History of Aesthetics

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âê School of
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HISTORY OF ESTHETIC
HISTORY OF ESTHETIC
BY
BERNARD BOSANQUET,
Hon. LL.D. (Glasgow)
Ftnnerly FtHmi of VnaienUy
College,
M.A. (Oxon.)
Oxford
LONDON
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN &

1904
CO. LIM.
CO.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN
First Edition, May, 1892. Skcond Edition, April, 1904.
Butler & Tanner The Selviood Priming Môrkt Frmite and
Londm
PREFACE.
Êsthetic theory is a branch of philosophy, and exists for the sake of knowledge and not as a guide to practice. The present work is,
therefore, primarily addressed to those
interest in understanding the place
who may find a philosophical and value of beauty in the system
of
human
life,
as conceived
by
leading thinkers in different periods
of the world's history. It is important to insist that the aesthetic philosopher does not commit the impertinence of invading the artist's
domain with an apparatus
belli
of
critical principles
and precepts.
opinion that this is so draws upon aesthetic much obloquy, which would be fully deserved if the opinion were true. Art, we are told, is useless ; in a kindred sense aesthetic may well submit to be useless The aesthetic theorist, in short, desires to understand the artist, also.
The
not in order to interfere with the intellectual interest of his own.
latter,
but in order to satisfy an
But besides professed students of philosophy, there is a large and increasing public of readers who are genuinely attracted by a fairly clear and connected exposition of any philosophical science the subjectmatter of which comes home to them, be it Logic or Ethic, Sociology, or the theory of Jleligion. Such readers are approaching philosophy through the subject-matter that already interests them, instead of approaching the particular subject-matter simply because it is an I confess to cherishing a hope that in integral part of philosophy. deprive this book of the charm that a more spite of the defects which
might have given to such a subject, many intelligent lovers of beauty will be glad to make acquaintance, through it, with
skilful writer
the thoughts of great

world.
men upon
this important
element of the spiritual
I have regarded my task, however, as the history of aesthetic, and not as the history of aestheticians. I have not paid much attention to the claims of historical justice. While I feel sure that no writer of the first rank is omitted, I could not venture to say that all the
Xll
PREFACE.
writers included are
have thought
in the
first
more important than any that are excluded. I of the arrangement necessary or convenient in order
to exhibit the affiliation of ideas, and their completest forms, and only
second place of the individual rank and merit of the writers to be dealt with. Moreover, as the first chapter will show, I have not been able to persuade myself to treat my subject as a mere account of speculative theory. No branch of the history of philosophy can be adequately treated in this way, and the history of aesthetic least of alL My aim has therefore been to exhibit philosophic opinion as only the clear and crystallized form of the aesthetic consciousness or sense of beauty, which is itself determined by conditions that lie deep in the life of successive ages. I have desired, in fact, so far as possible, to write the
history of the aesthetic consciousness.
Many
readers
may
complain of the almost total absence of direct
reference to Oriental art, whether in the ancient world or in
modern
China and Japan. For this omission there were several connected reasons. I was hardly called upon, even if I had been competent for the task, to deal with an aesthetic consciousness which had not, to my knowledge, reached the point of being clarified into speculative
theory.
definite
It was,
moreover, necessary to limit
my
subject in
some
way; and it seemed natural to exclude everything that did not bear on the continuous development of the European art-conIn so far as contact with Oriental art influenced the early Greek, and again the Byzantine development, a reference to it is implied in Hegel's and Morris' treatment of those periods. And finally,
sciousness.
this omission is not without a positive ground, though here I really touch on a matter which is beyond my competence. The separation from the life of the progressive races, and the absence of a reflective
theory of beauty, must surely have a fundamental connection with by Mr. Morris in the art of China and Japan (p, 456). Without denying its beauty, therefore,
the non -architectural character pointed out
I
regarded
it
into the
beautiful.
same connected
of aesthetic
and not well capable of being brought European feeling for the study of such art from a competent hand, in the light theory, would be a welcome aid to modern speculation.
as something apart,
story with the
With reference to my use of authorities, while there is often more egotism than modesty in calling the public to witness the course of an author's reading, I feel absolutely bound in this case to warn
my
readers that the reliability of the different parts of my work is unequal. For the mediaeval period between Plotinus and Dante, and in a lesser
PREFACE.
Xin
degree for the Hellenistic period between Aristotle and Plotinus, my knowledge is not, for the most part, at first hand, and represents a voyage of discovery rather than a journey on ground familiar to me. I have not for these periods been able to follow the scholar's golden
rule
never to quote from a book that he has not read jfrom cover
1
to
cover.
though I judge of the context, my estimate of the writer's position usually rests on the authority, in many cases Erdmann's History of Philosophy and
the articles in the Encydopcedia Britannica, which I have consulted for information. In the case of Thomas Aquinas in particular, I profess
have drawn my quotations from works of reference, and iiave, as a rule, carefully verified them and endeavoured to
no
original
knowledge
at
all.
The very
full
quotations most
courteously furnished
me by
Dr. Gildea appeared too significant to
be
supposing that in judgment were before me. I do not desire it to be understood that he agrees with me in the estimate which I have formed of St. Thomas's aesthetic
left
unused, and his authority warranted
me
in
these passages the principal materials for forming a
views.
It
would have been
foolish, I
thought, to omit the
more obvious
points of the mediseval development, both in art and in opinion, the
mere mention of which might be suggestive to my readers, simply because I had to take them from such writers as Prof. Adamson, Prof. Seth, Prof. Middleton, Mr. Morris and Mr. Pater, and not from original research. Some division of labour must be allowed, though the fact that it has been resorted to should always be made
known.
for assistance are due from me above all to A. C. Bradley, who not only furnished me with a list of books which has been of the utmost service, but lent me out of his own library many of those works, which I might otherwise have had a I also owe the most cordial thanks to Mr. difficulty in procuring. D. Rogers, for permitting me to embody in an Appendix his J. analyses of some instances of musical expression models, as I think, of what such analyses should be and to Dr. Gildea, for the information mentioned above. And, finally, it is only right to say, that it is on the Council of the Home Arts and Industries Association, and in contact with its workers, that I have learned to appreciate, as I hope, with some degree of justice the writings of Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Morris, which may easily remain a sealed book to those who have not observed in simple cases the relation of work-
Acknowledgments
Prof.
manship to
life.
Many
readers,
who
are familiar with the average
XIV
PREFACE.
work of the classes of that Association, may think that it reveals no great mystery of beauty but I am convinced that the leaders of the Association have sound insight, and that experience, to an in;
creasing extent,
is
justifying their principles.
London,
April, 1892.
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

chief duty in preparing a second edition of this work has been to remove so far as possible, by corrections in the form of notes, the defects which arose from its being published previously to Professor Butcher's Treatise on Aristotl^s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. I have made no pretence of re-writing, as it was impossible for me seriously to attempt the task. I have therefore let the text stand, except in case of obvious misprints, and have admitted errors or made observations on criticisms in notes appended to the chapters which they concern. These notes are indicated by letters of the alphabet, and will, I hope, be readily distinguished from the footnotes indicated by numbers. On meeting with a reference " a," the reader has only to turn to the last page of the chapter before him, where he will find
My
the note referred to. I do not think that my general view of the relation between ancient and modern .(Esthetic is seriously modified by Professor Butcher's treatment of Aristotle, while my aesthetic theory on the
is corroborated by it. As a worshipper of the Greeks, I am only too glad to follow him towards ascribing on the whole a deeper suggestiveness to their views than I had previously permitted myself to find there. In my anxiety not to go too far, I may hardly have gone far enough. At any rate, I wish to say that my references to his work cannot possibly discharge a reader who cares for the subject from the duty and pleasure of studying it for himself. I have not attempted to modify my interpretation of Aristotle's definition of Tragedy, which is simply that of Bernays. Professor Butcher has developed a modification of this view, which the student should learn from Professor Butcher's work. I hope that the fact of a second edition of a work like this being
whole
may indicate that with all its defects it has a point of view which is felt to be valuable. And I hope that this point of view may soon come to be more effectively presented by more capable critics and more attractive writers than the author.
called for
St.
Andrews, March
1904.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
CHAPTER
Proposed treatment, and OF Beauty.
1. 2.
......
I.
.
xi
PAGE
its
connection with the definition
3.
The History of .Esthetic, and the History of Fine Art The relation of Natural Beauty to the Beauty of Fine Art The definition of Beauty, and its relation to the History
.Êsthetic
of
CHAPTER
The
reflection.
1.
11.
creation of a poetic world, and its first encounter with

Early Reflection hostile to Art
Creation of the World of Beauty
10
2. 3.
10
11
. . .
Reason
for the Attitude of Reflection
4.
5.
Neglected Suggestion in the Idea of Imitation Wide use of term " Imitation " in Ancient Philosophy
Further Explanation
i.
.12
.
13 13
13
6.
how Greek Art could be called " Imitative "

makes
it
Facility of Imitative Art
Ideal
ii,
Hellenic Art not so Abstractly Ideal as has been thought

for .Esthetic
13
7.
The Ground prepared
Theory
.15
CHAPTER
The fundamental
beautiful.
III.
outlines of Greek theory concerning the
I.
The The
a.
Principles
and
their
Connexion
16
17 18
Moralistic Principle
How it shows itself

aiv
p. Its Êsthetic Value
21
XVI
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
XVU
PAGE
iii.
The Function
a.
of Tragedy
.
Materials from Aristotle
6. Estimate of his meaning Concrete Criticism i. History and Elements of Drama

.
64 64 66 68 68
ii.
Plot and character-drawing
70
CHAPTER
V.
Alexandrian and Greco-Roman CULTURE TO CONSTANTINE THE GrEAT.

I.
THE
REIGN
OF
Character of the Period General Philosophy and Art a. Philosophy

.
77 81
/8.
Poetry
i.
...
81
86
New and
Latin
Comedy
86
ii.
iii.
The Idyll The Anthology
y.
iv. Roman Poets Formative Art and Architecture
.... ....
87 88 88 93 99 99 100 102
102
Ill
Reflective .Esthetic
i.
Stoic
ii.
Epicurean
......
.
. . .
iii.
Aristarchus and Zoilus
iv.
Later Greco-Roman Critics

Plotinus
a.
V.
Symbolism
Concrete Criticism
-113
114
115
p. .(Esthetic Interest
y.
CHAPTER
VI.
Some traces of the continuity of the esthetic consciousness throughout the middle ages.
I.
Our Attitude to the Renaissance Tendency to extend Renaissance back towards Christian Era
i.
120 120
121
Bsj&aEibiaelite..Eauiiing
ii.
iii.
Thirteenth Century French Literature
Abelard
...
122
123
Earliest Centuries
iv.
Architecture and Decoration back to Sixth Century

Christian Art
V.
vi.
and Song of the
123 126
130
Necessity of an Interval of Austerity
xvin
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
Intellectual Continuity of Esthetic
i.
from Plotinus
From Emanation
to Evolution
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
vi.
vii.
viii.
Dualism and Love of Nature " Augustine on " Beauty of Universe Suppression of Paganism and Increasing Austerity Significance of Iconoclasm The System of Scotus Erigena Anticipation of End of World in looo a.d.
.... ....
132
133
133 136 137
139 143
ix.
The Modern Mind in St. Francis The .Êsthetic Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas
144 146
CHAPTER
VII.
COMPARISON OF DaNTE AND SHAKESPEARE IN RESPECT OF SOME
FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS.
1.
Limits of the subject
151
2. 3.
4.
The Selection of Artistic Form by the two Poets The Kind of Significance aimed at by each The true Relations of the later Renaissance
.
152
156 162
CHAPTER
The PROBLEM OF MODERN
1.
VIIL
jESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY.
2.
The Process of Preparation The Prolonged Interruption

Preparation of the Problem
i.
....
of .Êsthetic
:
166 166
170 170
171
3.
The two
Descartes to Baumgarten Tendencies, " Universal " and " Individual

other
ii.
Distinguished from Ancient Philosophy
111.
From each
173
Connexion with Mediaeval Dualism

V. .Êsthetic
174
175
Ideas in pre-Kantian Philosophy
ii^fepitz
b.
c.
^baftsl3igry
^.pie
.... ....
.
177
177 178
d.
e.
Nature of the Advance
180
182
BaumgîJeo
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
XIX
CHAPTER
The data
1.
IX.
of modern esthetic philosophy.

188 188
Limits of the Subject

Classical Philology
i.
.
ii.
Joseph Scaliger F. A. Wolff

.
188 189 190

191 192
2.
Archaeology
i.
Early Discoveries on Italian Soil

Early Ti-avels in Greece
.
ii. iii.
Hercnlanum and Pompeii

Greece proper
192 197
iv.
3. Art-criticism
i.
ii.
Pierre Comeille
Fontenelle and Voltaire
197 201 202

.
iii.
The
a.
British Writers
Burke and Lord Kaimes a. Burke's Purgation Theory

6.
c.
The Sublime
akin to Ugliness of Later Ideas
Painful Reality not Disagreeable
203 203 203 204

205 206
d. Anticipations
p. Hogarth y. Reynolds
iv.
....
. .
Germans before Lessing

o.
209 210
211
Gottsched
p.
V.
The
Lessing
a.
j8.
....
" Swiss "
214 216
217
y.
8.
.
His Conception of Criticism of the Laocoon Demarcation of " Painting " and Poetry Lessing's Attitude towards the Problem of Ugl A point in which his Classicism was justified
Aim
220
223
225
229 230 239 240

242
C His Theory
vi.
of the
Drama
.
Winckelmann.
a.
/3.
His Characteristics
Feeling for Art as
Human
Production
True sense of a History of Art

Recognition of Phases in Beauty Conflict between Beauty and Expression
utilized
y.
8.
244 248
251
vii.
viii.
Data not
by the
Critics
Indications of a Transition
252
XX
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
KantThe
1.
X.
PAGE
.
.
problem brought to a focus. His Relation to the Problem and the Data
the Esthetic Judgment
is
.
.
^SS 261
2. 3.
Place of the Esthetic Problem in his System
.256
.
.
Why
i.
the
Answer
to the
.
Problem
.
ii.
iii.
Demarcation of Esthetic Consciousness Positive Essence of Esthetic Consciousness

Its Subjectivity
.
-265
.
...
.
.
265 266
267 275
4.
5.
and Concrete in Kant's Esthetic Range and Subdivision of .(Esthetic Perception

Conflict of Abstract
.
.274
.279
280
'.
Theory of Sublime
Classification of Arts
ii.
6.
Conclusion
CHAPTER XL
The
II.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
XXI
PAGE
II.
i.
ii.
Hegel Dialectic in the Esthetic The Conception of Beauty o. The Beauty of Nature (i) Beauty of Abstract Form (2) Beauty in Unity of Sense-Material /?. Beauty of Art ; the Ideal (i) Nature and the Ideal (2) The Ideal in Life and Action
.
334 33^
337
.
-338 -339
34 34
-343
345
(3) Evolution of the Ideal
The Symbolic
Art-form
....
.
.
Classical Art-form
346 34^
347
Romantic Art-form
(4) Classification of the Arts
a.
yS.
.
.
-349
.
The Double
Basis
Facts that Support the Double Basis

of the Analytic Classification
.
7. Principle
iii.
349 350 352

355 35^
Four Leading Conceptions Defined

(i) Ugliness
(2) (3) (4)
....-.
-355
The Sublime The Tragic The Comic
IV.
Conclusion
35^ 3^ Sô
CHAPTER
*'Exj\.ct" /esthetic in
1.
XIII.
Germany.
363 363 363 365 368 368 369 370 371
372
2.
Need of Exact .(Esthetic Schopenhauer of post-Kantian i. Schopenhauer a kind Beautiful, and, its Modifications ii. His account of the
iii.
Criticism of Schopenhauer
3.
Herbart His Formalism and its Consequences i. Relations ii. His Division of Esthetic
.
"
iii.
Classification of the Arts
iv.
Criticism
4.
Zimmermann The Distinctive Work

i.
.._
and Estimate
of Formal .Esthetic
.
373
ii.
iii.
iv.
Meaning of the "Together" Elementary and Simple Forms Psychological Meaning of the Theory, and
374 376
377 380
its
Value
XXll
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
5.
Fechner
i.
Criticism of Previous Inquiries
381 381
ii.
Experiments with Rectangles,

Esthetic Laws
etc.
382
iii.
6.
7.
Stumpf
i.
Scope of his Analysis

Êsthetic
Conclusion
How to judge of Formal
ii.
Iii.
Lesson of its History Inclusion of Exact Esthetic in Idealism
384 387 388 388 389

391
CHAPTER
The METHODICAt COMPLETION OF
XIV.
OBJECTIVE IDEALISM.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
XXUl
CHAPTER
sion.
1.
XV.
PAGE
Beginnings of a theoretical reunion of content and expresPhilosophical Conditions of Recent English iîsthetic
.
.441
442 442
2.
General Influences of the

a. Antiquities
6.
c.
Time
Science
Romantic Naturalism
d.
The Democratic
Spirit
444 445 446

447
Synthesis of Content
i.
and Expression
ii.
iii.
The Characteristic The Life of the Workman The " Lesser Arts "
Penetrative Imagination
Classification
448
45
454
.
iv.
and the Limits of Beauty

.
.458
.
V.
4.
Conclusion
i.
....
by
Material, Applied to Poetry
460
462
ii.
Requirements of ^Sisthetic Science to-day The Future of Art
465
467
APPENDIX
I.
Hegel's Abstract of his Esthetic System
47 r
APPENDIX
II.
Some Analyses of Musical Expression, by Mr.

Bibliography
J.
D. Rogers
488
495
Index
499
NOTE.
it has been decided to issue the present -volume of the Library of Philosophy in a slightly smaller size than that adopted for the preceding volumes. Future editions of the latter and new volumes of the series will be uniform vnth this volume.
In compliance with repeated suggestions
HISTORY OF ESTHETIC.
CHAPTER
I.
PROPOSED TREATMENT, AND ITS CONNECTION WITH THE DEFINITION OF BEAUTY.

It was not before the latter half of the eightthe term " Esthetic " was adopted with the meaning now recognised, in order to designate the philosophy of the beautiful as a distinct province of theoretical inquiry. But the thing existed before the name for reflection upon beauty and upon fine art begins among Hellenic thinkers at least as early as the time of Socrates, if not, in a certain sense, with still earlier philosophers. If, then, "-Esthetic" means the Philosophy of the Beautiful, the History of Esthetic must mean the History of the Philosophy of the Beautiful and it must accept as its immediate subject-matter the succession of systematic theories by which philosophers have attempted to explain or connect together the facts that relate to beauty. But this is not all. It is found ilecessary in a historical treatment, even of logic or of general philosophy, to bring them into continuous relation with the concrete life that underlies the formal conceptions which are being passed in review. The speculation of every age issues on the one hand from the formal teaching of the past, but on the other from the actual world as it urges itself upon consciousness in the present. As the history of logic or of general philosophy cannot be wholly dissociated from the history of science or of civilization, so the history of ethical or of aesthetic ideas is necessarily treated in some connection with the history of morals or of fine art. But within this analogy there is a notable distinction.
^'tS'Znd
I-
tie^HJ^t^ ** eenth century that
read, for example, the history of the Inductive Sciences in connection with the growth of logical theory, we can take little interest in the bygone phases of particular branches of knowledge, except in as far as they help us to understand that development of the human mind which is at the moment the subject of our study. Antiquated chemistry or astronomy have for us an interest of curiosity no greater than that which a pile-dwelling or a flint hatchet has for the anthropological student. The same is true of many other elements of civilization, such as the details of political form or of social custom, the niceties of language, the minutiae of religious dogma. In all these aspects of life, although it is true that to have deciphered the past greatly aids us in understanding the present, yet on the whole, excepting with a view to scientific research or historical realization, we are accustomed to let bygones be bygones. Moral and religious ideas, indeed, such as have been all-powerful in a remote past, generally retain a capacity of arousing our present interest so deep is the identity of man's moral nature throughout all its manifestations. But nothing is in this respect on a level with the greater creations of fine art, including noble literature. They alone have an importance which rather increases than diminishes as the ages go by. And thus when, we attempt the task of tracing the aesthetic consciousness through the stages of its development, we have before us a concrete material not of mere antiquarian interest, but constituting a large proportion of what is valued for its own sake in the surroundings of our present life. The History of Fine Art is the history of the actual aesthetic consciousness, as a concrete phenomenon ; aesthetic theory is the philosophic analysis of this consciousness, for which the knowledge of its history is an essential condition. The history of aesthetic theory, again, is a narrative which traces the aesthetic consciousness in its intellectual form of aesthetic theory, but never forgets that the central matter to be elucidated is the value of beauty for human life, no less as implied in practice than as explicitly recognised in reflection. In spite of the natural repugnance which may be felt against analytic intermeddling with the most beautiful things which we enjoy, it must be counted. an advantage ol this branch of the history of philosophy that it promises us not merely a theoretical interpretation of what is past and gone, but some aid at least in our appreciation of realities
;
When we
PROPOSED TREATMENT.
which appear to be the least perishable inheritance that the world possesses. 2. I have assumed in the last section that Fine ât^'Beauty Art may be accepted, for theoretical purposes, as
*of Fii*Art^
the chief,
if
not the sole representative of the
world of beauty. It is necessary to explain the point of view from which this assumption appears justifiable. All beauty is in perception or imagination. When we distinguish Nature from Art as a province of the beautiful, we do not mean to suggest that things have beauty independently of human perception, as for example in reactions upon one another such as those of gravitation or solidity. We must therefore be taken to include tacitly in our conception of natural beauty some normal or average capacity of aesthetic
plain that " nature " in this relation differs art " principally in degree, both being in the medium of human perception or imagination, but the one consisting in the transient and ordinary presentation or idea of the average mind, the other in the fixed and heightened
appreciation.
But from "
if so, it is
which can record and interpret. studying any department of physical causation, we should not think it possible to restrict ourselves to considering the so-called facts which daily meet the eye of the unintuitions of the genius
Now
in
trained observer. to perceive and

;
from science that we must learn how that we rely, both in our own observations as far as we are qualified observers, and also in the organized and recorded perceptions of others, from which almost the whole of our natural knowledge is practiIt is
it is
upon science
cally derived.
Nature in the sphere of aesthetic is analogous to the perception of the ordinary observer in matters of physical science. In the first place, it is limited for each percipient to the range of his own eyes and ears as exercised on the external world, for it does not exist in the form of recorded or communicable contents and in the second place, it passes into the province of art, not by a sudden transition, but by continuous modification, as the insight and power of enjoyment to which the
;
beauty of nature is relative are disciplined and intensified by Therefore, just as in esthetic training and general culture. speaking generally of the real world we practically mean the world as known to science, so in speaking generally of the beautiful in the world we practically mean the beautiful as
revealed by art. In both cases we rely upon the recorded perceptions of those who perceive best, both because they are the best perceptions and because they are recorded. This habit does not exclude the necessity of interpreting, appreciating, and, so far as may be, correcting the recorded Nor does the beauty of art, perceptions by help of our own. The fact that thus understood, exclude the beauty of nature. a completed " work of art" is a definite thing or action, which in some cases does not even represent any natural object, must indeed be duly considered, and the creative spirit must be recognised as a factor in artistic production. Nevertheless, it is a blunder to imagine that there is no art where there is no " work of art," or that whenever the painter is not at work on a picture he sees the same nature as we see and no more. For this reason it is justifiable in theory, as it is necessary in practice, to accept fine art as the main representative of the beautiful for the purpose of philosophical study. Even such an analysis of natural beauty in the light of physical fact as has been attempted by Ruskin in the Modern Painters is chiefly directed to showing how great artists have extended the boundaries of so-called natural beauty, by their superior insight into the expressive capabilities of natural scenes and The standard by which the critic measures the objects. achievement of the artist, when he says that he is measuring it by nature, is of course in the last resort his own artistic feeling and more or less trained perception. Nature for aesthetic theory means that province of beauty in which every
man
is
his
own
artist.
THe Beauty and

^tietic.
Definition of
its BeuLtion to
the History of
There is no definition of beauty that can be have met with universal acceptance. It * \ appears, however, to be convenient that an ex3*
said to
planation should now be given of the sense in which the term will be employed in the present work. And if in such an explanation the fundamental theory of the ancients can be presented as the foundation for the most pregnant conception of the moderns, the resulting definition will at least lend itself readily to the purposes of a history of
cEsthetic.
Among
ful
the ancients the fundamental theory of the beauti;
was connected with the notions of rhythm, symmetry, harmony of parts in short, with the general formula of unity in variety. Among the moderns we find that more emphasis
DEFINITION OF BiÂU TY.

significance, expressiveness, the utterin general, that is to say, on the ; conception of the characteristic. If these two elements are reduced to a common denomination, there suggests itself as a comprehensive definition of the beautiful, " That which has
all
is
laid
on the idea of
that
life
ance of
contains
characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract
expressiveness in the same medium." The quality which is thus defined is of wider range than the predicate " beautiful " as commonly understood. It will be for the subsequent historical treatment to show that neither fine art nor average aesthetic perception can in the long run be confined within narrower limits than these. few words may be added here by way of anticipatory ex-
planation.
The commonplace view is not wholly at fault which sees in the great art of the ancient Hellenes chiefly the qualities of harmony, regularity, and repose. Although the whole theory of modern aesthetic may well find application and support in the real variety and significance of Hellenic decoration, sculpture, and poetry, yet, as science begins with what is most obvious, it is not surprising that aesthetic reflection should have called attention in the first instance to their pervading harmony and regularity. Qualities of this type, because they symbolize, in a mode that appeals to sense-perception, the most abstract relations of systematic and orderly action or existence, may fairly be set down under the head of general or abstract The recognition of these relations as conexpressiveness. stituent elements of the beautiful was the main contribution of ancient philosophy to aesthetic analysis. But when with the birth of the modern world the romantic sense of beauty was awakened, accompanied by the craving for free and passionate expression, it became impossible that impartial theory should continue to consider that the beautiful was adequately explained as the regular and harmonious, or The theory of as the simple expression of unity in variety. sublime now makes its appearance, at first indeed outside the the theory of the beautiful ; but it is followed by the analysis of the ugly, which develops into a recognised branch of aesthetic inquiry, with the result of finally establishing both the ugly and the sublime within the general frontier of beauty.
The
instrument by which this conciliation
is
effected is the
conception of the characteristic or the significant and the conflict between the harsher elements thus recognised and the common-sense requirement that all beauty should give pleasure, is mitigated, on the one hand by a de facto enlargement of average aesthetic appreciation, and on the other hand by the acceptance of such primary relations as harmony, regularity, or unity, in the light of essential elements organically determining all imaginable contents, and demanding, in their degree, characteristic expression for sense. Thus in the definition of beauty above suggested, the pregnant conception contributed by the moderns is merely a re-application in more concrete matter of the formal principle In the widest sense, then, and enunciated by the ancients. omitting to insist upon the narrower and commoner usage in which the characteristic in the sense of individually characteristic is opposed to the formal or symmetrical, it would be sufficient to define beauty as " the characteristic in as far as expressed for sense-perception or for imagination." If, indeed, we were attempting a psychological determination of the feeling that attends or constitutes the peculiar enjoyment known as the enjoyment of beauty, we should probably have to deal with a term not mentioned in the definition above proposed the term pleasure. But in attempting to analyse the content which distinguishes perceptions or imaginations productive of this enjoyment from others which are not so productive, it appears to me that we should commit " a serious error of method if we were to limit " expressiveness " characterization " either by beauty, which is the term to or be defined, or by pleasantness, which is a quality not naturally coextensive with the term to be defined. The former error is not, in my judgment, wholly avoided by Goethe, when he insists that the characteristic, although essential to art, is yet a principle limited and conditioned by beauty in the strict sense, which is needed to soften the rigidity or abstraction of Thus the definition is made self-destructhe characteristic. tive, beauty being at once the term to be defined, and an unanalysed limiting condition in the defining predicates. The latter error is committed in any such definition as that suggested by Schlegel, " the pleasant expression of the good." Things give pleasure sometimes because they are beautiful^ and sometimes for other reasons. They are not beautiful simply because they give pleasure, but only in so far as they
;
DEFINITION OF BEAUTY.
and the nature of the presentation that gives aesthetic pleasure is the matter to be ascertained. It will be seen that the part played in Goethe's account by the term beauty or grace, as a formal condition of artistic treatment, and in Schlegel's account by the differentia pleasant, intended to guard against caricature or defect of harmony, is transferred in the definition which I have ventured to suggest to the formal or general element of characteristic expression, the element- of unity or totality as symbolised by harmonious, symmetrical, or coherent dispositions of lines, surfaces, colours, or sounds. It would be tautology to superadd the condition of pleasantness to this formal element of the characteristic, if the two terms mean the same thing, as I believe that in aesthetic experience they do while if pleasantness were taken in the normal range of its psychological meaning, and not as thus both limited and extended by identification with cesthetic pleasantness, the definition would become indisputably too narrow, even supposing that its other elements prevented it from being also too wide. The highest beauty, whether of nature or of art, is not in every case pleasant to
;
give cesthetic pleasure
the normal sensibilility even of civilized mankind, and is judged by the consensus, not of average feeling as such, but rather of the tendency of human feeling in proportion as it is developed by education and experience. And what is
pleasant at first to the untrained sense a psychological fact universal than the educated sensibility is not as a rule, though it is in some cases, genuinely beautiful. The definition, then, should be either purely analytic of contents accepted as beautiful purely metaphysical, if we like to call it so or purely psychological. To introduce a psychological differentia into a metaphysical definition obtained by comparing the actual data of beauty, is to introduce a factor which we cannot control, because the differentia so introduced is itself in need of analysis and limitation on purely psychological ground before it will coincide with the data to be investigated. Some attempts at psychological analysis will be recorded and criticised in the course of this history I will at present simply suggest as an approximate psychological definition of aesthetic enjoyment "Pleasure in the nature* of a feeling or presentation, as distinct from pleasure in its momenSuch pleasure tary or expected stimulation of the organism." would always, it is my belief, be connected in fact with the
more
HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC.
significance of the content of feeling, but the meeting-point of the psychological and metaphysical definitions would not
within the scope of psychology. In hope of dispelling any prejudice that may be raised gainst this conception on account of its apparent tendency to intellectualism, I will show in a few words how it is generated by consideration of extreme cases in the domain even of nonaesthetic feeling. If anything in the region of taste, smell, touch, heat or cold, has a value akin to that of beauty, it is not, surely, either the strongest or the most delightful sensation, but rather the most suggestive sensation, or that which is most highly charged with associated ideas, so normal that we do not take them to be accidental. Not the scent of Eau-de-Cologne, but the smell of peat smoke or of the sea, not the comfortable warmth of the house, but the freshness of the morning air, are sensations of a kind in which we may feel a certain disinterested delight not wholly dissimilar to aesthetic enjoyment. The merest germ of the sense of beauty seems to imply a distinction between stimulus and signififall
cance.
I have thus, I hope, justified in three respects the procedure which I intend to adopt. First, I have given my reasons for treating the history of Esthetic as an account, not merely of aesthetic systems, but, so far as may be in my power, of the aesthetic consciousness which has furnished material for these systems, and has formed the atmosphere in which they arose. Secondly, I have explained the necessity which compels aesthetic theory to accept fine art as the main representative of the beautiful, and I have attempted to show that this necessity-does not force us to neglect any important element of the facts with which we are to deal. Thirdly, I have propounded, in a few words, a definition of the beautiful which lends itself to the development of modern out of ancient aesthetic by a natural progression from the
abstract to the concrete, analogous to the equally natural advance from the classical to the Christian world of artistic production and insight into nature. And I have attempted to lay down a thorough distinction between the analytic and
comparative treatment of beautiful presentations with reference

to their common properties qua beautiful as progressively recognised in the development of culture, and the psychological
DEFINITION OF BEAUTY.
inquiry into the nature and differentia of that enjoyment which these presentations produce. It is plain that these two investigations have a common frontier in the connection between elements of presentation and elements of enjoyment but in order that they may effectually co-operate, it is essential that they should not at the outset be confused. In the next chapter I propose to begin the examination of the aesthetic feeling and theory prevalent among the ancient Hellenes.
This definition has been condemned as obscure. Yet I have seen no other, professing more distinct, which does not rest simply on a part or consequence of the characterhere laid down. The point is one which cannot be grasped without some attention, because it involves the distinction of two aspects of sense-perception, which probably coexist in all perceptive experience, but appear as if at a certain level the one took the place of the other. 1 refer to what might roughly be called the mental and the bodily aspect of a. senseperception. There is its peculiar character, by which it addresses us differently from any other sensational content ; warm, blue, high or low (of sound), and so on. There is also the disturbatice or excitenjent which it causes, whether pleasurable or painful, merely, I suppose, in virtue of the physical reaction to stimulus which it involves, in common with every physical reaction which enters into consciousness at all, say, for instance, organic sensation. I have expressed this distinction by the words "nature" and "stimulation." I would willingly replace " nature " by " form," if it were clearly understood that this had nothing to do with space or time in particular, and might include, for example, a significant intensity ; or by " relation, " if it were understood that this did not exclude the special sensation-quality of a colour or sound, in so far as this speaks to us differently from the content of any other sensation of the same or of another sense. Take, for example, our plea.sant feeling of the warmth of the fire on a cold day, and that of a simply pleasant colour, without pattern, say, in curtains or wallpaper. It seems to me quite plain that in the enjoyment of the colour there are two distinguishable elements. One which it has in common with higher perceptions of beauty in art and nature is an interest in the peculiar utterance of the colour as if a word in the great language of the sensuous world. It is different for every colour and spatial arrangement of colour, and different for colour from what it is for any other sensation. It is not an abstract intellectual meaning, but it is to the colour what meaning is to a word. The other element may be described by contrast as *' physical." It is the bare fact that in the sensation we are pleasurably excited, soothed, or gently stimulated. The supposed perception of colour has it in common with the feeling of I do not doubt that some casual warmth, and with many cases of the organic feelings. But it seems to me incontrovertible that connexion exists between the two elements. The enjoyment of warmth or of health feels in the relation is not directly proportional. But it seems to be in want of one way exactly like the simple enjoyment of the colour. something. Its " mental " element, or " nature," is hardly traceable; its pleasant stimulation is almost, though not quite, a blank fact per se. Now I do not doubt that these two sides are really present in all sensation and senseBut they are perception, from organic feeling to the highest regions of aesthetic enjoyment. not proportional, and in complex cases may be discrepant, as when a " sensation " mars the unity of what would be a good work of art, and thereby increases the enjoyment of the weaker spectators. The reasons for admitting the presence of the "nature" throughout are first that it seems a truism that every state of consciousness has a nature, if we were skilful enough to detect it ; secondly, that great writers sometimes show us, through their unusually delicate analysis, the presence of a significant nature where we should fail ourselves to detect it (cf. Dr. Middleton's praises of wine in the Egoist) ; and thirdly, that thus by this distinction we remove the difficulty arising from the early stages of almost physical attractiveness on the part of sensation, as when a child turns towards a bright light.
a.
to be
istic
CHAPTER
II.
THE CREATION QF A POETIC WORLD, AND ENCOUNTER WITH REFLECTION.

^rtitoto^"
I.
ITS FIRST
the earlier Greek philosophers, or even Plato, the prophet of beauty, expecting to find in them a simple reflex and appreciation of the plastic and poetic fancy of their countrymen, we shall be seriously The thought of Hellas passed through all the disappointed. phases which were natural to profound and ardent intelligence and the partial truths at first freely turned upon the world which it successively attained were uttered with a definiteness and audacity which conveys a first impression of something
If
we approach
like perversity.
a modern reader finds that the fair humanities of old religion aroused among the wisest of early philosophers either unsparing condemnation or allegorical misconception, he is
forced to summon up all his historical sympathy if he would not conclude that Heracleitus and Xenophanes and Plato, and the allegorising interpreters of whom Plato tells us, were inBut in reality this moral and capable of rational criticism. metaphysical analysis, directed against the substance of a poetic fancy which was thus beginning to be distinguished from prosaic history, was the natural sequel of artistic creation, and the natural forerunner of more appreciative theory. 2. The Creation of Hellenic poetry and formaCreation of the worid of Beauty, tjyg ^ff ^^j j^g regarded as an intermediate stage between popular practical religion and critical or philosoThe legendary content of this art was not phical reflection. the work of the poet or the formative artist, but of the national mind in its long development out of savagery. Its imaginative form, on the other hand, was due indeed to the national mind, but to this mind chiefly as it acted through the individuality of poetic genius, investing the national thought and emotion with progressive significance and refinement. For although it may be doubted whether the word corresponding
When
CREATION OF A POETIC WORLD.
II
to beauty or the beautiful was ever used in the whole range of Hellenic antiquity in a meaning perfectly free from confusion with truth or goodness, yet it is certain that art is more than nature, and that the definite presentation of ideas in
beautiful shape cannot but prepare the
aesthetic
way
for
judgment by developing a
distinct type of
an explicit sentiment
and enjoyment.
Thus in Hellenic art and poetry, as it existed in the middle of the 5th century b.c., we find embodied a consciousness in relation to beauty, which, if much less than theoretically explicit, is much more than practical and natural. There is a naive apprehension of a profound truth in the familiar saying of Herodotus,^ that Homer and Hesiod made the Hellenic theogony, and determined the forms and attributes of the gods, for Hellenic belief The full force of this reflection is measured by the interval between the early wooden image and the Phidian statue, or between the superstition of a savage and Antigone's conception of duty. It was in the world of fine art that Hellenic genius had mainly recorded, and, in
created, this transformation. 3" When therefore the first recognition of the Season for the Attitude of existence and significance of art takes the shape of e ec on. hQgtjjjj-y jq (jjg anthropomorphic content which it retains, we see not only that the reflective idea of beauty is.
recording,
had
conspicuous by its absence, but that theory in advancing beyond the popular faith fails to recognise the actual refinement of that faith by which poetic fancy has paved the way~ for the speculative criticism which condemns it. On the other hand, we must observe that the criteria now actually applied the wholly unsesthetic criteria of reality and of morality spring from a principle from which we shall only
still
in part escape within the limits of Hellenic antiquity. This principle is, as we shall see, that an artistic representa-
kind or in aim from a reality of ordinary life. To make distinction between them is. always a hard lesson for immature reflection but for a Hellenic thinker there were reasons which made it all but impossible. The Greek world of ideas, before or outside the philosophic Its parts were homoschools, was wholly free from dualism. The god, for example, was not conceived as an geneous.
tion cannot
be treated as
diflerent in
Hdt.
2.
S3.
HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC.
unseen being merely capable of an incarnation, such as could

nature rather his real shape was human, though to reveal it to mortal eye might be a rare favour, and he lived in a particular hill or in a particular temple. The representation of a divine being was to the Greek not a mere symbol, but a likeness not a symbol which might faintly suggest Him who could be known only in the spirit, but a likeness of one who dwelt on earth, and whose nature was to be visible, and not to be invisible. Thus, in speaking of a question about the supernatural in Homer, Schelling has said that in Homer there is no supernatural, because the Greek god is a part of nature. And therefore, although a work of creative idealization unparalleled in the history of the world had been performed by the plastic fancy of Greece in the age that culminated with the highest art of Athens, yet in the absence of any mystic sense of an invisible order of realities the prevalent impression produced by this world of beauty was rather that of imitative representation than of interpretative origination. 4- Even the idea of imitation, indeed, contains Ne lected snggestiou In the germ of a fuller sesthetic truth than was ever ideaofimitauon. attained by Hellenic thought for the translation of an object into a plastic medium involves a double and not merely a single element, not merely a consideration of the object to be represented, but a consideration of the act of imaginative production by which it is born again under the new conditions imposed by another medium. Natural common sense expressed this truth in one of the earliest aesthetic judgments that Western literature contains, when on the shield of Achilles, the Homeric poet says,^ " the earth looked dark behind the plough, and like to ground that had been ploughed, although it was made of gold; that was a marvellous piece of work." The " marvel " is that the mind can confer on a medium of its own choosing the characteristic semblance of what it desires to represent. But of all that depends upon this side of imitation the spiritual second birth of beauty we hear but little explicitly in Hellenic science, although, within defective formulae, som^ glimpses of it forced themselves upon Aristotle. For the reasons which have been indicated the tendency of all
not express or exhaust his
full spiritual
177.17.548.
IMITATION AND IDEALISM.
1 3,
immature reflection to judge by reality and utility, and the absence of a belief in anything which could not be visibly imitated the poetic or creative side of artistic representation did not wholly come to its rights in antiquity. Perhaps it was even less regarded by the philosophers than it was, in the consciousness of poetic inspiration, by the epic and lyric poets, or by Plato himself outside his formal treatment of the metaphysic of imitative art. widetrseaf 5. It is howevcr the case that the term imitatdonînî^ttion in ancient aesthetic theory is opposed rather pwioBophy. tQ industrial production than to artistic origination, and is compatible with a considerable variation and expansion of import, which I shall endeavour to trace in a separate chapter. It is natural that the earliest formula adopted by reflection should be strained to breaking point before it is abandoned. ^- I* ""^7 Still appear extraordinary to us, after Further Erpianation how all is said, that the art which we contrast with Greek Art could ,, n be called "imi- our owii as a peculiar sense ideal, and as equally tatiTo." remote from the vicious attempt at illusion, and from the justifiable delight in detail, should have been characterized by enlightened opinion in its own day as a mode of imitation or mere representation. If this is our feeling, we may profitably consider in two respects the nature of the art which we are discussing. ^" the first place, just because the Hellenic * Facility of imitatiTo Art makes artist or poet was free from the overwhelming *^ ' sense of spiritual significance which is the essence of mystic symbolism, he was able to delineate in large and " ideal " outlines the general impressions which he It is gathered from life by a scrutiny not too microscopic. unnatural that the art which sets itself to portray what not attracts it in a complete and actual world should be more full of repose and less tormented with the subtleties of expression than an art to which every minutest human or natural feature may be of unutterable symbolic significance. And if we thus see how an imitative art, Heuenic Art not ii. unburdened with a " mission " or revelation, may idî^hS'f heen thought, bg ideal simply because it is at ease; on the hand we must to some extent correct our traditional other conception of the degree in which Hellenic beauty was devoid of strangeness, and humour, and animated expression. The
'
m
.
14
critics
from
have derived our current notions of the and the " antique " have of course performed a necessary task, and have revealed a distinction as deep as Yet, after life between the ancient and the modern world. all, the ancient world also was alive, and possessed a range of sympathetic expressiveness which was but inadequately rendered in the first impression made upon modern theorists by The identification fragments of its monumental sculpture. of the ancient ideal with the general or abstract, which a due regard to Greek literature might at once have proved to be a very partial truth, has been further modified by the labour of more than a century in piecing together the plastic surroundings of this ancient life, and appreciating the descriptions which assist us to realize them. " The task before me," ^ writes one whose work in this direction must be a revelation
" classical "
to all
whom we
me
are not specialists in archaeology, " The task before touched with inevitable sadness. The record we have That loss, but for to read is the record of what we have lost. Pausanias, we should never have realized. He, and he only, gives us the real live picture of what the art of ancient Athens
who
is
Even the well-furnished classical scholar pictures the was. Acropolis as a stately hill approached by the Propylsea, crowned by the austere beauty of the Parthenon, and adds to his picture perhaps the remembrance of some manner of Erechtheion, a vision of colourless marble, of awe, restraint, Only Pausanias tells him of the colour and severe selection. life, the realism, the quaintness, the forest of votive statues, the gold, the ivory, the bronze, the paintings on the walls, the golden lamps, the brazen palm-trees, the strange old Hermes hidden in myrtle leaves, the ancient stone on which Silenus sat, the smoke-grimed images of Athene, Diitrephes all pierced with arrows, Kleoitas with his silver nails, the heroes peeping from the Trojan horse, Anacreon singing in his cups all these, if we would picture the truth and not our own imagination, we must learn of, and learn of from Pausanias. " But if the record of our loss is a sad one, it has its meed of sober joy ; it is the record also of what if it be ever so little in these latter days we have refound." It is not a false opinion that harmony, severity, and repose
;
Mythology and Monuments of Anct. Athens, by Miss
J,
E. Harrison,
xi..
THE BEGINNING OF THEORY.

;
are fundamental characters of Hellenic craft and fancy th history of a single decorative form, such as the acanthus foliê, is enough to illustrate the profoundness of the contrast thus indicated between the antique and the modern. But we must master and adhere to the principle that although the given boundaries of Greek aesthetic theory can be in some degree justified by the comparative limitations of the art which was its material, yet this justification is only relative, and means not that Greek aesthetic was an adequate account of Greek art, but only that it was a natural and obvious one. Thus we shall find that true aesthetic analysis among the Greeks extended only to the most formal element that enters into Hellenic beauty while its passion and its human significance and its touches of common things attracted the censure of an unsesthetic criticism and supported the classification of the whole range of artistic utterance under the superficial title of " imitation." Had the realism of the antique been less modest and refined, it would have challenged an analysis which would have replaced censure by explanation. But the time for this was not yet and it will be seen that in spite of the protests of the philosopher and the satirical comedian, theory was forced in the long run to become more subtly appreciative as art became less severely noble. have now arrived at the point where 7. Freparedior the Strictly philosophical consideration of aesthetic ^stheuc Theory, world phenomena may be expected to begin. shapes and fancies has been brought into being, of beautiful which must of necessity have trained the perception to recognise beauty as displayed in the corresponding province of nature, that is, mainly in the human form, and must have developed some partly conscious sentiment of the beautiful as distinguishable from the good and the true. This imaginary world has been recognised as a new creation both negatively by the claims of the metaphysician and the moralist, and positively by the naive appreciation of the historian and the The mystic is the allegorising construction of the mystic. forerunner of a later age but the historian and the philosopher agree, by their acquiescence and their censure respectively, in treating it as claiming to pass for a simple reproduction of natural reality. And thus the immense panorama depicted by Hellenic imagination enters the range of philosophic vision under the title of mimetic or representative art.
;
We
CHAPTER
III.
THE FUNDAMENTAL OUTLINES OF GREEK THEORY CONCERNING THE BEAUTIFUL.

'^^^ present chapter will be devoted to stating in logical connexion, regardless of any historical development within the limits of antiquity, the general principles which determine all Hellenic thinkers in their inquiries concerning the beautiful. The task of tracing historically the pressure which progressive insight and experience brought to bear upon these conceptions, with the consequent straining of the formulae until breaking point was reached, will be attempted in the following chapter so far as space and ability permit. The cumbrous expression, " theory concerning the beautiful," has been intentionally adopted. For of the three connected principles which constitute the framework of Hellenic speculation upon the nature and value of beauty, there is one only that can claim the more convenient title of "aesthetic
^d SSrotonexion.
theory."
The two other principles in question might be respectively described as moralistic and as metaphysical, although the common root of both is itself a metaphysical assumption which is also responsible for the limitation of true aesthetic analysis in the third principle to the abstract conditions of expression. This metaphysical assumption, natural to incipient speculation, is to the effect that artistic representation is no more than a kind of common-place reality of reality, that is, as presented to normal sense-perception and feeling and that it is related precisely as the ordinary objects of perception are related, to man and his purposes, subject only to, a reservation on account of its mode of existence being less solid and complete than that of the objects from which it is drawn. This belief is intimately bound up with the conception of a homogeneous or thoroughly natural world, which makes it
ART AN INFERIOR REALITY.
necessary to assume that the essence of art and beauty does not lie in a symbolic relation to an unseen reality behind the objects of common sense-perception, but in mere imitative relation to those common objects themselves. It "was tTiis prevalent idea that dictated the philosophical treatment to be accorded to the newly recognised phenomena of an art which produced only images of things, and not the useful realities known and handled in every-day life. It was not as yet observed that the ultimate import of these phenomena, involving the total separation of aesthetic semblance from practical reality, was incompatible with the idea which throughout
antiquity controlled their interpretation, sufficient verification of the predominance of this principle is to be found in the current generalisation by which both Plato and Aristotle gathered up the arts which we call the fine arts under the name "imitative" or "image-making" as contrasted in the first instance with those which are " produc-
Even in Plotinus imitation is the tive" or "thing-making."^ general term which describes the attempt to create beautiful forms or fancies for the purpose of aesthetic enjoyment. It may be well also to point out a passage in Aristotle's Politics * which may fairly be paraphrased, as asserting that man is, as a matter of course, affected by the reality of a fact in the same way as by its representation, so that what we learn to like or dislike in the semblance for its mere form, we shall similarly This is a doctrine which Arislike or dislike in the reality. qualify, as will be seen in the next totle in part knew how to chapter but Plato followed it uncompromisingly through his entire theoretical treatment of the imagination. From this metaphysical assumption there arise in close connection the two principles concerning beauty, which I have and also the called metaphysical and moralistic respectively restriction of esthetic theory proper, to what is contained in I arrange these principles in an ascendthe third principle.
; ;
ing order according to their aesthetic value. I. If artistic representation is related to man Moralistic prtodpie. only as common-place reality, then to represent an immoral content is only to double the exanaples of immorality, and to strengthen, by suggestion, the incitements to it. In other words, it, follows that morally the representations of art
1
Plato, Sophist,
Ar., Fol., 1340
266 D. a. 26;
Ar.,
Mys., 199
a. i5.
De Part. Anim.
645
a.
4 (see Butcher,
155;.
in respect of their content,
must be judged,
criteria as real
Metaphysical
Principle,
by the same moral

the
life.
2.
If
artistic
it
representation differs from
represents, whether human or other, only in the degree and completeness of its existence, then it differs only for the worse, and is a purposeless reduplication of what already was in the world. In other words, it follows
nature which
a second nature, only in the sense of being an incomplete reproduction of nature. If artistic presentation can never have a 3jEsthetic Principle, deeper content than the normal or common-place object of perception which it represents, then there can be no explanation of beauty involving any deeper attributes than those which normal perception is able to apprehend in common-place reality. In other words, it follows that, eesthelically, beauty is purely formal, consisting in certain very abstract conditions which are satisfied, for example, in elementary geometrical figures as truly as in the creations of fine art. I will discuss these principles in order, with reference to their general predominance in Hellenic theory, and to their
that, metapkysically, art is
aesthetic significance.
would be idle to deny that both Plato and encumbered with moralistic considerations throughout the whole of their inquiry into the nature of fine art. How far either of them approached the accepted modern doctrine that aesthetic interest in the beauty of a presentation is distinct from the real or selfish interest in its
Moraustio
Principle.
I-
It
Aristotle are
actual existence for the satisfaction of desire, is, according to the plan which I have adopted, a question for the next chapter. It is enough at present to establish the general point of view before us as actual in Hellenic theory by the following consideration.
How It shows
itseit
The moral and
intellectual
practical judgment is the firs outcome of organized social life, and
i:
upon the world of beauty so long as this undistinguished from the objects which constitute the mean and purposes of real action. Not only Heracleitus and Xeno phanes, with their condemnation of Homer, but Aristophanes with his praise of him as a teacher of good life, and with hi
inevitably turned
i:
corresponding censure of Euripides, are examples of thi mode of opinion, which, in fact, persists strongly in unpractise minds even in the modern world.
MUST THE HERO BE GOOD
great philosophers betray in this respect, though different degrees, a naive directness of judgment extremely trying to any modern reader who is not thoroughly trained in the habit of historical appreciation. They appear to abandon themselves almost unsuspectingly to the abovementioned principle, that the resemblance has the same effects as the normal reality. The distinction between image and object, which was destined in the long run to grow into a recognition that beauty and practical reality affect the mind in quite different ways, has for Plato mainly the effect of intensifying his moralistic suspicion of the unreal simulacrum which fancy supplies. For the imagination, he believes,^ is psychologically connected with the emotions and therefore the imaginary world of art, while sharing the power of the real world to form habit by example, possesses that of creating emotional disturbance in a far greater degree. And it cannot be maintained that Aristotle breaks the net of this assumption, which we saw that he expressly formulates, however much he may have done to strain it. The student of modern sesthetic will find himself, when he reads the Poetics, in a region almost wholly strange to his ideas of criticism. It is plain, for example, that Aristotle shrinks from- a true tragic collision,* in which passion or character determine the individual's destiny, and this in spite of the abundance in which such individualities as those of Prometheus, Clyteemnestra, CEdipus, Aias, Antigone and Medea, were presented to his view by ancient tragedy. And the reason plainly lies in his subjection of all criticism to his division of character into good, bad, and indifferent,^ excluding, ipso facto, all that conflict of a great passion or purpose with the surrounding world, in which tragic interest properly consists, and which make the character a symbol of forces that lie behind the phenomena of life as named by current morality. The conclusion that the hero of tragedy must be neither very good nor very bad,* and that his fate must be determined by error* and not by wickedness, is think that the hero unintelligible to modern judgment. both very good and very bad, that is to say, that he may be must above all things be great, and comprehend in himself the
in
The two
somewhat
We
Republic, p. 606.
2 Poet., xiii.
and
in the most
Ibid.
modem
* Ibid.
4. See Susemihl's notes, which represent Aristotle's idea colours possible.
20
differences
HISTORY OF
.lESTHETIC.
which make possible the highest discord, and thereAll these ideas are excluded ab fore the highest harmony. initio by the moralistic categories under which Aristotle subsumes his species of tragic plots. Then again, as we should expect, it is his preference ^ that
the fatal action in which a tragedy culminates should be done in ignorance, and its nature only discovered afterwards ; for the discovery, if made in time, would have, he thinks, the The effect of preventing the terrible action from taking place. in this context, is plot of the Medea, which he mentions therefore naturally censured by implication as shocking. Here the natural So, too, with the classification of artists. pre-eminence of the moralistic point of view is very trenchantly It is simplest to quote the passage (the point laid down. being to distinguish species of imitation, according to the
objects which they imitate): " Now all artistic representation is of persons acting, and these must necessarily be either noble or inferior (for all moral temperament [ethos] conforms to this distinction for it is goodness and badness of moral temperament by which all men are distinguished from each other) that is, either better So in comparison with us, or worse, or just like ourselves. we may see with the painters Polygnotus painted people From better, Pauson worse, Dionysius just like ourselves. all this it is clear, that each of the kinds of representation which has been mentioned will include these differences, and will have different species according as the objects which it represents differ in this way. For these dissimilarities may occur
;
even in dancing or in performances on the flute or the lyre, and so too poetry may display them whether it be with or
without verse
acters,
first
;
for instance,
Homer
represents nobler char-
to
Kleophon average ones, Hegemon of Thasos, the make parodies, and Nicochares, who wrote the Deliad,
. . .
below the average. And this is the difference that distinguishes tragedy from comedy, for the latter aims at representing worse people, and the former better, than those
of present reality." Here again the student, not only of Shakespeare and Goethe, but of Homer and of the Attic drama, entirely loses his bearings. It seems to him that the poetic world is stronger
*
Poet., xiv. 6, 8, 9.
2 Poet.,
ii.
GREEK MORALISM.
in its attributes, alike in the good as in the than the world of every-day life, as presented to everyday observation. What about Thersites ? as Mr. Mahaffy asks. The poet who should represent individuals as only better than common men, or again as only worse, would be to us simply a monster, except in so far as the art of Aristophanic comedy is concerned and even here the adjective "worse," with its moralistic associations, does not at all express the true bearing of the representation, which it seems probable that Aristotle was unable to appreciate. Many subtleties might be urged against this interpretation of Aristotle, and to some of them it will be attempted to do justice when we speak of modifications within Hellenic theory. But it does not appear to me that we should be justified in hampering ourselves by such refinements, to the extent of denying that Plato and Aristotle had their feet firmly planted within the compass of naive practical moralism, however much they may have looked away to other and more fertile
evil,
;
and more emphatic
regions.
^- ^' "^"^' ^^ remembered, however, that grant. ing the almost total absence of a distinctively iESthetic standpoint, there is no form in which a healthy sense of relative values could assert itself with respect to art, except the form of moralistic criticism. The content of such a criticism is the determination that the central core of life shall have justice done to it in the representation of life, and this determination is characteristic of the temper in which not only genuine speculation, but the greatest works of art, have
j:stiiettc
value
always originated. The development of moral reflection by Plato into apparent hostility to nearly the whole world of classical beauty must be regarded historically speaking as a reduction adabsurdum, not of the human content, but of the non-zesthetic form of the principle which he professed to be advocating. And it is hard to believe that in this and other respects he was wholly unaware of some such ironical import in his own speculations. The technical defect thus revealed consists in substituting a direct connection of subordination for an indirect connection of co-ordination between the spheres of beauty and of the moral order. By this subordination beauty is required to represent the moral order as moral, and nothing more whereas it is really an expression, co-ordinate with the moral
22
HISTORY OF ÊSTHETIC.
order as a whole and not bound under its rules, of that larger complication and unity of things which reflects itself in the sense of beauty on the one hand, and on the other hand in the social will. But not only is the substance of early moral criticism sound;
in
one
definite relation
even
its
form
is justifiable.
Beauty, indeed, within its expression's sake, is secure from praise or censure
own
territory of expression for
upon purely
But wherever expression is not for expresmoral grounds. but is determined by alien motives such as the sion's sake, promotion of virtue or knowledge, or again the stimulation of sensuous desire, then it is outside the aesthetic frontier, and moral criticism upon it is justified not only in substance but also in form. It is doubtful, indeed, whether ancient philosophy ever thoroughly applied the distinction between aesthetic and but it is plain that this very failure to practical interest distinguish between them in theory is largely owing to the constant confusion between them in practice, and that the censure which pronounced much of fine art to be immoral involved a consciousness that true aesthetic interest must be pure, and was only mistaken in admitting that which it condemned to be fine art at all. Then the estimation of beauty by the practical standard of right and wrong, although unaesthetic in form, contains two
;
It bears witness to the instinctive elements of aesthetic value. demand for depth and completeness in art as representing the powers that reveal themselves in that order of the world of which the moral order is one among other significant reflections and it embodies the conviction that there is a spurious art and beauty, which being not free but subservient to a practical or sensuous end, cease to be objects of aesthetic judgment and become the legitimate prey of moral censure or commendation. And censure of these must indeed always be one degree truer than commendation for a fraud, however pious, can never be wholly satisfying to morality. Now the pretence of beauty, in a presentation the true interest of which is other than aesthetic, must always be in some degree a fraud. difficulty presents itself at this point which cannot be treated in full till we come to deal with the niceties of modern analysis. At present we can only observe that this distinction between free and servile or spurious beauty depends not on
; ;
PLATO ON IMITATION.
23
the description, necessarily abstract as all language is, which the artist or percipient may give of his own purpose or ground of enjoyment, but on the degree in which, as a matter of fact, an abstraction due to an alien purpose of any kind whatever is apparent as distorting the presentation. The Metaphysical 2. The formative and poetic art of Hellas at Principle. jê close of the 5th century b.c. had attained a completeness in itself which was emphasized by a pause in
its development and an indication of new tendencies. It was natural that at such a moment its significance should
challenge the attention of the great contemporary philosopher, and also that his treatment of it should consist in an explicit formulation of the current Hellenic conception, such as on the one hand to lay by its help the foundation-stone of all sound aesthetic theory, while on the other hand to exhibit by a reductio ad absurdum the onesidedness of the conception itself. In estimating the achievement of such a philosophy, it is not necessary to consider how far it was intentional. have to accept its doctrines in their actual significance, and not to inquire whether Plato may ever have entertained any other view of art and imagination than that which he found it necessary to analyse. a. I quote a passage which summarises the Hov it shows Itself. doctrine of Plato's well-known polemic against all representative art.^ "And there is another artist [besides the workman who I should like to know what you makes useful real things]. would say of him.
We
Who
. .
.
is
he
is
the maker of all the works of all other workmen. This is he who makes not only vessels of every kind, but plants and animals, himself and all other things the earth and heaven, and the things which are in heaven or Do you under the earth he makes the gods also. not see that there is a way in which you could make them yourself 1 there are many ways in which the feat might be accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round you would soon make the sun and the heaven and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and
One who
all
the other creatures of art as well as of nature in the mirror.

*
Republic, bk. x.
Jowett, marg., p. 596-7,
24
" Yes, he said but that is an appearance only. " Very good, I said, you are coming to the point now the painter, as I conceive, is just a creator of this sort,
;
is
and he
not?
"
Of course.
But then
I
"
untrue. creates a
And
bed
.''
suppose you will say that what he creates is yet there is a sense in which the painter also
,
" Yes, he said, but not a real bed. " And what of the manufacturer of the bed ? did you not say that he does not make the idea which, according to our view, is the essence of the bed, but only a particular bed ? " Yes, I did. " Then if he does not make that which exists he cannot make true existence but only some semblance of existence and if any one were to say that the work of the manufacturer of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth. No wonder then that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth. Well then here are three beds, one existing in nature which as I think that we may say, is made by God there is another which is the work of the carpenter ? And the work of the painter is a third ? Beds then are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them God, the manufacturer of the bed, and the painter ? God, whether from choice or necessity, created one bed in nature and one only two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God. . Shall we then speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed ? "Yes, he replied, inasmuch as by the natural power of creation He is the author of this and of all other things. " And what shall we say of the carpenter ; is not he also the maker of the bed " Yes. *' But would you call the painter a creator and maker ? " Certainly not. " Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the
;
.'*
bed
"
?
I
think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make. " Good, I said then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an imitator; and the tragic poet is an
;
POPULAK NOTIONS OF ART.
25
imitator, and therefore like all other imitators he is thrice removed from the king^ and from truth ? " That appears to be the case. Then about the imitator
we are agreed. And now about the painter I would like know whether he imitates that which originally exists
;
to
in
nature, or only the creations of artists [artificers] " The latter.
" As they are, or as they appear ? you have still to determine this. mean, that you may look at a bed from I different points of view, obliquely or directly or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality. Which is the art of painting an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear of appearance or of reality ?
"Of appearance.
the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth all things because he only lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example a painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artificer, though he knows nothing of their arts and if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter. And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that everybody knows, and every single thing, with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and And so when we hear persons saying that the imitation. tragedians and Homer, who is at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as well as vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet must know what he is talking about, and that he who has not this knowledge can never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also Perhaps they may have been there is not a similar illusion.
"
Then
and can do
deceived by imitators, and may never have remembered when they saw their works that these were but imitations thrice
'
The
allusion is to bk.
ix.
p.
586
ff.
26
removed from the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth, because they are appearances only, and not real substances ? Or perhaps after all they may be in the right, and poets do really know the things about which they seem to the many to speak well ? Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would devote himself to the imagemaking branch ? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as though he could do nothing better ? 1 he real artist who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations and would desire and to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them." Here we see the theory of imitation laid down in a definite metaphysical form, ostensibly as an annihilating criticism on the value and reality of art, though consisting in a simple formulation of the current conception regarding it. Three
decisive points in the passage call for our notice.

fBtbetic Semblance,
!
realities
Art works with images only and not with such as can act or be acted upon in the
life.
world of ordinary
Eeiattonto
ii-
These images are not symbolic of the ultioommon Reality, j^^te reality as created by God that is, in our language, of the relations and conditions which to a perfect knowledge would be present as determining or constituting any real object in the order of nature. The appearances
;
which fine art consists are superficially imitative of the second or common-place reality which is relative to every-day purpose and sense-perception. "i- The images of art must be judged Inferiority by and tbia standard, therefore condemned by their capacity of representing common reality either with sensuous completeness or with intellectual thoroughness the reality is in every way preferable to the imitation,^ and, it is added lower down, even beauty depends on a correct representation of use.
in
Of these three characteristic assertions the first must be reserved for treatment under the head of aesthetic value. Here we need only observe that it is fundamentally and absolutely true.
Plato, Rep., p.
60 1.
DUALISM IN PLATO AND ARISTOTLE.
27
aesthetic
third constitute the differentia of the nonaccount of art natural to Hellas and till their contentions are fairly challenged and repudiated, we are safe in saying that no true aesthetic of representative or concrete art has been attained or is possible. For, so long as they are admitted, the standard of judgment lies ex hypothesi in the appearance and purposes of reality as accepted by every-day
;
The second and
action
and experience.
Plato
is
Whether
serious or consistent with himself in in-
sisting that the relation of art is to the " second," and not to It is sufficient the " first" reality, does not concern us here.
to note that the essence of a mimetic theory could not be more trenchantly formulated than by this classification of realities, on the assumption which I believe to be indisputable, that Plato's first and highest reality has for us an intelligible meaning as practically corresponding to the completes! conception in which the order of nature can be presented to a
to the reader that Aristotle, not holding to the metaphysical dualism so sharply expressed by Plato in the passage which has been quoted, was not under the necessity of repudiating the relation of art to common reality there laid down, so definitely as Plotinus afterwards repudiated it. Common perceptible reality, it would then be alleged, contained for Aristotle the true real and universal, and therefore the dependence of art upon the former was not for him definitely And hence, separable from its dependence upon the latter. refinements which we shall find in his it might be urged, the theory and his criticism, are not mere practical qualifications of the old conception, forced upon him by increasing critical experience and closer observation of the healthy love of beauty, but are satisfactory evidence of a fundamental change of standpoint in the direction away from the mimetic and I believe, however, towards the symbolic art-consciousness. In the first place, the view would be erroneous. that such a cfifference between Plato and Aristotle in regard to philosophical dualism is not at all such as is commonly supposed, or such as the above passage from the Republic might lead a reader to imagine, who is unacquainted with the varying and subtle gradations in which the so-called " doctrine of ideas The appearance presents itself throughout Plato's writings.
human mind. It may occur
of dualism
is
produced by
efforts to
apprehend the principle
28
that the object is relative to the subject, and bearing this principle in mind we shall not find more than a difference in degree between the metaphysical position of the two great philosophers. The distinction between reality for perception and reality for thought is essentially the same to both of them. And in the second place, if we add to the evidence above referred to regarding Aristotle's moralistic position that which has also been adduced with respect to his view on the effect of resemblance in comparison with that of reality, and if we observe the weak psychological qualification by which alone he limits this latter principle,^ we cannot doubt that as a matter of fact Aristotle thoroughly adhered in metaphysical as in moral criticism to the conception of art as a mimetic representation of the world"^ in the shape which it takes for normal action and perception. This metaphysical estimate of image-making |8. Its asthetio Value. fjjjg g^j^^ closely associated at least in Plato with an analogous psychological estimate of the imagination, although in form non-sesthetic, and profoundly hostile to the value of the poetic world, is in substance an important foundationstone of sesthetic theory.
It is not Sufficiently recognised that in the iPolemic of Republic, Book X., taken in conjunction with other well-known passages in Plato, there is laid down the essential doctrine of sesthetic semblance as plainly as in Schiller or in Hegel. The imputation of inferiority that the appearance is superficial compared to the sensuous reality is of merely transient importance in itself, but is of the highest significance as a phase of estimation through which the aesthetic appearance must naturally pass on its way to complete recognition as distinct from common-place fact. The double-edged nature of the phenomena of imitation now neces" To imitate," means no doubt sarily begins to reveal itself. to produce a likeness of; but what is a likeness ? In what medium does it exist ? Of what relations to practice and to
iEatuetic semboanoe.
reality is it capable } To all these questions the criticism of naive metaphysic has its answers. likeness is a projection or superficial reproduction of a real thing, in a medium incapable of exhausting the content of the original reality, or of fulfilling the purposes or satisfying the interests which
See cb.
iv.
ESTHETIC SEMBLANCE.
attach to
its
it.
29
And
art is constituted entirely of likenesses,
and
mental "medium is the imagination or image-receiving faculty. The censure of inutility which follows upon this trenchant distinction, by denying the naive conception of an adequate^ relation to reality, leads us to the recognition of an
which is not that of utility, nor of relation to any satisfaction connected with the sensuous impulses. Moreover, when Plato insists that the appearances employed by the artist are in relation not with the unseen world of thought and law, but with a lower reality which is itself only an image of that unseen world, it is impossible not to observe in this a strong though negative suggestion of the function of beauty as a symbol for spiritual things. And indeed as regards beauty, though not as regards art, this suggestion even takes a positive form, when it is laid down ^ that the Creator in making the world beautiful necessarily modelled it on the ultimate underlying order whereas anything modelled upon the created world itself, and therefore especially such presentations as those of art, must inevitably be devoid of beauty. There could not be a more definite challenge to subsequent reflection, which could hardly fail to ask, whether to reveal the
;
aesthetic interest
beautiful in the deeper significance thus accorded to created
things might not be the purpose and essence of art. ."' Besides enforcing the truth implied in the semblance Ininimetic theory, Plato reduces to an absurdity its *^ReaSt?*** element of falsehood. This element, it must be remembered, he found expressed in the reflective opinion of his time,* just as he found an element of non-aesthetic interest in its artistic practice. All that he has to do, is to formulate the received opinion with perfect self-consistency, and draw the inference which immediately presents itself Whether in his own mind he sympathized with that inference, I believe that we can never know. If it were possible to conjecture, on the basis of his general and less strictly scientific utterances, I should venture to think it possible that the problem pressed upon him as one of fundamental importance that the current Plellenic theory, within which he found himself, agreed only too well with some phenomena of existing art, and was profoundly unsatisfactory to the great thinker and that he therefore examined this theory seriously, with the re;
;
Timceus, 28 B.
^\.c.
above, p. 25
30
suit, "
If, and in as far as, this is the true explanation of art, art has not the value which popular judgment assigns to it." The further suggestion, " There must be more in it than this," must no doubt have presented itself to him, as we can partly see, in various forms, with various degrees of explicitness
and urgency. But his final utterance as a metaphysical theorist on representative art considered as imitation of reality, is in brief: "so far as the value of aesthetic appearance depends either upon its sensuous or upon its intellectual adequacy to natural and human reality so far it is a failure and does not merit the attention of serious men." That is to say, either
artistic
representation
is
worthless, or, out of the conditions
revealed by reproduction in the there must be developed an aim and interest, other than the aim and interest presented by the reality which is represented. It should be added that although the conclusion as here stated and motived is absolutely just, yet there is also a minor question of true aesthetic involved in discussing the degree of the artist's actual knowledge. Though his object is not to rival reality, but to seize its suggestions, he depends profoundly and increasingly on his knowledge of it, which Plato seems to us to under-estimate. The above negative result, together with the former and positive result that "Art has its being in appearance," not yet extended to the generalization "that beauty has its being in appearance," form the elements of permanent aesthetic value contained in the metaphysical principle upon which Hellenic theory concerning fine art is founded. now approach the consideration of the iEstheac 3. Principle. Qg t^yg aesthetic principle recognised by Hellenic antiquity in general. This may be described as the principle that beauty consists in the imaginative or sensuous expression of unity in variety.
possibilities
imposed and
medium of appearance,
We
an aesthetic principle in contradistinction to the and metaphysical principles which we have hitherto been examining, because it raises no question of other attriI call
this
moralistic
butes or relations in the beautiful object, such as conduciveness to virtue, or degree of reality, nor does it involve the assumption which underlies such questions, that art is a mere reflection of nature but it does, directly and in general form, attempt a solution of the problem, " What is the nature of beauty as a characteristic of experienced presentations } "
;
FORMAL BEAUTY.
31
Hellenic answer to such a question was necessarilyThe reasons for which art appeared at first to be the mere reproduction of reality are also the reasons which prohibited sesthetic analysis from insisting on the concrete significance of what is beautiful in man and in nature. So long as common reality the object of average perception is regarded as the standard of art, there is an insurmountable barrier against the identification of beauty with the spiritual expressiveness which only a higher perception can apprehend. Or, in other words, to accept the imitation of nature'^ in the widest sense as the function of art, is simply to state the problem of concrete beauty in the rudest manner possible, adniitting a total inability to solve it. For to say that the material of beautiful presentation is in some way drawn from the objects of sense-perception does not touch the question, " What can art do more than nature ? " But when we ask tn what respects, that is, in virtue of what general character or conditions, a reality, whether presented or represented, is beautiful, then we have raised the specific question of aesthetic science. And to this a mimetic theory, for which one reality is, in strictness, as good a model as another, has ex hypothesi no answer. But there are simple cases and traits of beauty which either have nothing to do with the direct representation of life and nature, or are to be found in such representations merely as limiting conditions imposed by the same principles which constitute the entire content of the former and simpler cases of The analysis of these cases and characteristics is not beauty. barred by the mimetic theory, which has only a remote and metaphorical application to them. And although we asserted that for ordinary Greek life there was no unseen or spiritual world to which a sensuous presentation could be related as a mere symbol, yet the most general principles of action and knowledge soon became familiar to the intelligence of so gifted a race, and were naturally applied by its thinkers as spiritual principles to the analysis of such formal and abstract beauty as obviously did not consist in the reproduction of
formal.
The
natural reality. In dealing with a true aesthetic conception we need not, as before, separate the account of its application from the estireview of the cases in which it mate of its aesthetic value. is applied, beginning with the most general statements of its
32
range, forms the best criticism of the principle, which may be further elucidated at the close of this chapter by comparison with some modern researches. a. The synthesis of the one and the many was, General statementa In Ancient as we all know, the central problem and the cenwriters. The con^^.^j achievement of Greek philosophy. ception of unity in variety is the indispensable basis of that
idea of system or totality of interdependent parts, which was destined to be the structure erected by modern speculation upon the definite foundation laid by the Greek thinkers. The relation of whole to part a slightly more concrete expression for unity in variety has never been more perfectly elucidated and more justly appreciated than by Plato and Aristotle, and it is in recognising the satisfaction afforded to the mind by the sensuous or imaginative embodiment of this relation that they make a first step in genuine aesthetic
analysis.
When we say with approval of a poem or of a musical composition, that it has a beginning, middle and end, we are probably not aware that we are repeating a principle which Aristotle, in dealing with the drama, after the precedent of a less explicit passage in Plato, ^ has defined with naive profoundness. "A tragedy ^ is a representation of a whole action a whole is what has beginning, middle, and end. beginning is what does not necessarily come after something else, but is so constituted as to have something else come after it an end, on the contrary, is what is so constituted as to come
something else but to have nothing after it and a middle is what is so constituted as to come after something else and also to have something else after it for beauty depends upon size [so that the relation of the parts may be
after
;
appreciable] and order." So, again, we may often hear about any beautiful object, " it would be impossible to add or take away the smallest part " Just without spoiling it." This is genuine Greek esthetic. as," Aristotle says,^ " in all other representative arts a single
representation is of a single object, so the story [of a drama] being the representation of an action, must be of a single one, which is a whole and the parts of the scheme of incidents must be so arranged that if any part is transposed or removed
;
Fhcedrus, 268 D.
See ch.
iv.
* Ar.,
Poet,
vii.
1-4.
p^gf^^ yjjj
FORMAL BEAUTY.
;
33
the whole will be disordered and shattered for that of which the presence or absence makes no appreciable difference is no part of the whole."
reason Greek philosophy is inclined to select mathematical form, ratio, or proportion, as the pure and typical embodiment of beauty. " Now since the good and the beautiful are different (for the former is always a property of action, but the latter extends to objects free from motion), those are mistaken who affirm that the mathematical sciences say nothing of beauty or goodness. For they most especially discern and demonstrate the facts and definitions relating to them for if they demonstrate the facts and definitions relating to them, though without naming the qualities in question, that is not keeping silence about them. The main species [elements ? e'S^'] of beauty are order, symmetry, definite limitation, and these are the chief properties that the mathematical sciences draw attention to." ^ I subjoin a passage from Plato, to which reference will have to be made again. It is worth while to observe that almost all the actual material of Aristotle's thought, as distinct from the method of his treatment, may, as in this case, be discovered " The principle of goodness has reduced itself to the in Plato. law of beauty. For measure and proportion always pass into beauty and excellence." * " I do not mean by the beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but, says the argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane and solid figures which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and absolutely beautiful, and they have peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the pleasures of irritating an itching place (which has been taken above as the type of pleasure mixed with pain). And there are colours which are of the same character, and have similar pleasures. . . When sounds are smo^h and
; ; .
Moreover, the relation of the one to the many or of the part to the whole is represented in comparative purity by geometrical figures, or again by rhythms or spatial intervals that bear numerical relation to one another. And for
this
Ar., Metaph.,
1078
a.
^ Fhilebus,
marg., p. 64.
34
clear,
and utter a single pure tone, then I mean to say they are not relatively but absolutely beautiful, and have a natural pleasure associated with them." * The exclusion of life and pictures of life, in this passage, from the realm of absolute beauty, to which regularity and unity are essential, is a striking case of the limitation which we have seen to be inherent in Greek aesthetics. The concrete individual unity which underlies the apparent disorder of the beauty of life was not likely to be appreciated until after the same principle had been recognised in the more abstract or formal cases and conditions of its
embodiment.
And it is plain that formal beauty, as recognised in such passages as these, of which all Greek philosophy is full, is constituted by a symbolic relation a presentation to sense of a principle which is not sensuous. Such " presentation," in default of a more precise term, may sometimes be called an " imitation " * but it is impossible to " imitate " a nonsensuous principle in a sensuous medium. Of such symbolism or presentation we find /3. Particular
casea. ^.j^g following principal cases to attention of Plato or Aristotle.
have attracted the
i- There is no more obvious type of unity appealjng J.Q sense than is to be found in the self-identica quality of a colour extended in space or of a tone extendec in time. These, as was shown in the passage quoted abovf from the Philebus, Plato recognised as beautiful,* and, accord ing to the whole context of the passage and the expression; employed in describing the sounds in question, for the reasoi here suggested, namely as sensuous presentations of unity Not, of course, that this is the reason apprehended by th subject whose enjoyment is being analysed. That would a once transfer beauty from perception to reflection. It is onh suggested as the cause, observed and assigned by the theoris who is conducting the analysis ab extra. The same observation upon the beauty of pure colours am sounds as types of unity in diversity is made by Kant, am will have to be considered as a question of modern aesthetic It is obvious that not only the facts of artistic perception, bt the physical analysis furnished by science, throw a certai difficulty in the way of the explanation. For if "pure" mean
Colour and
Tone,
Philebus, marg., p. 51.
RepubL,
iii.
400 A.
^ Cf.,
Timaus, 80 B.
FORMAL BEAUTY.
35
unmixed, as Kant defines it to mean, are such pure sounds or even if they can be said to exist at all, the most beautiful ? It will be found however that the explanation will maintain itself, though in a more subtle form than that suggested by Plato, or even by Kant. Mr. Ruskin's account
colours,
difficulties referred to, presents
of " Purity as the type of divine energy," ^ while solving the a wonderful analogy with the idea as it first dawned on Plato.
Elementary
"
^^r^^
straight line, angles, are set
Elementary geometrical forms, even the and more particularly certain tri-
down
as absolutely beautiful.^
We
have interpreted this to mean that they are among the purest examples of unity in the form of simple regular or symmetrical
shape.
Strange as this assertion may appear to our aesthetic perwhich demands a more varied and concrete revelation of order or unity, I do not think that it can justly be denied. There is a degree of beauty belonging to every shape or structure which in any way affects perception with a sense of regularity or symmetry, that is, of the unity of parts in a whole as it displays itself where the whole is lacking in highly
ception,
concrete differentiation. And if we bear in mind that architecture and decorative ornament, of the severe though refined type congenial to Greek civilisation, fell outside the frontier of imitative reproduction, we may better understand how a Greek theorist might be content with a plain curve as a type of beauty, and how such a type might really involve a degree of delightful refinement which later ages have not again attained by such simple means. Plato indeed is apparently contemplating such examples as the straight line and the circle whereas, if our experts may be trusted, these most abstract of shapes are replaced in Hellenic architecture and decoration by delicate curves due to the skilled eye and hand of the artist-workman. But this contrast would only show, what the whole history of aesthetic must illustrate that theory follows but tardily after
;
practice.
In such cases as the above, although the principle of unity presented under very different sensuous embodiments, yet is they all agree in being highly abstract, and the principle
*
Mod. Painters,
vol.
ii.
Phtlebus,
\.c.,
Timaus,
I.e.,
An, Metaph.,
l.c.
36
therefore appears rather as their substance than as their limitIn any case we have here solid observations of ing form. If the explanation which Greek theory offers jesthetic fact. should appear inadequate, still it has done good service in drawing attention to these simple instances of beauty, which would in that case have to be dealt with on one or other of
the two extreme views known respectively as Formal JEsthetic, and as the .Esthetic of Feeling. now turn to those cases in which the abstract principle of unity is plainly inadequate to the concrete significance of the content, and yet is the only aesthetic explanation of it Here, then, organic which Greek theory could furnish. the substange is in fact nothing unity though alleged to be more than the condition, of beauty, 111^ Plato's restriction of permissible music to simple songmusic. yery simple song-tunes of a severe type, although has a moralistic aspect, is also a result and example of it The long discussion of his genuine but inadequate aesthetic. music and metre in the third book of the Republic, in which the conception of unity that permeates the ideal commonwealth is repeatedly contrasted with the multiplicity and variety inherent in imitative or dramatic music, makes it plain that the simple song-tune is acceptable to Plato partly because he is able to formulate to himself its symbolic function as expressive of a principle which has profound import for the The music which he rejects is partly indeed for him soul. expressive of evil and so far his rejection of it is moralistic and not aesthetic but to a far greater extent its defect in his eyes consists in being concretely reproductive of natural reality, and therefore not expressive of ideas nor related to And his life in any way that he is able to comprehend. refusal on this ground to recognise such music as healthy art What has no expresis a proof of genuine aesthetic insight. As a matter of fact very simple siveness is not beautiful. tunes ^ have an unrivalled capacity of symbolising elementary' moods and ideas. Aristotle, following Plato, observes upon this phenomenon with results to which we shall have to return in the next chapter. iv. The extreme generality of the principle which EtMcaiand Logical vmoies.yê are tracing in its applications produced a dan-
We
Mr. L. Nettleship in Abbott's Helknica,
p. 118.
THE BEAUTIFUL SOUL.
37
ger of confusion which Greek philosophy did not entirely

escape.
But we must not overrate the extent of
this evil.
constantly find in Plato fine arts or their productions compared, in respect of systematic reasonableness,^ both with moral or political relations and with industrial or non-representative crafts. But we must bear in mind that this is an absolutely just comparison, so long as it only serves to insist upon the common character of organic unity by help of the pre-eminent examples which fine art affords. The comparison of a member in a political whole to a feature in a statue,* with regard to the subordination which is essential in the one case as in the other, is perfectly adequate for the purpose for which Plato employs it. And no one is entitled to accuse him of a confusion between morality and aesthetic because he compares right and beauty in a point in which they are fairly comparable. But although it is an error to charge Plato on this ground with introducing ccsthetic ideas into ethical or logical reasonings, yet there was one direction in which, owing to the generality of its principle, Greek aesthetic unquestionably cast its net too wide. Beauty, as we understand it, is only for sense aad.for sensuous imaginaLtion. The " beautifiil soul " of modern] romance appears to derive its appellation from a metaphor which indicates a certain directness of delight afforded by the contemplation of its spiritual qualities, analogous to the directness of delight which attends the perception of sensuous beauty. Beauty of soul, or beautyin the supra-sensupus world, as recognised by Greek philosophy,' depends upon a somewhat similar metaphor, enforced by a degree of failure in differentiating the unreflective traditional use of the term "beautiful" and therefore partaking of the nature of a More especonfusion, although an expressive confusion. conception or archetype cially the notion of an intellectual of beauty such as itself to be beautiful, is a very serious niis-| should have hoped to find that beautyl take in aesthetic. was regarded as essentially the sensuous expression not of the beautiful, nor even of the good but simply of the real.
It is true that
we
We
' Plato,
Republic, i. 349 D. Fheedrus, passim,
Republic,
iv., init.
and
Ar., Rliet.,
1366 A.
38
HISTORY OF iESTHETIC.
This idea is plainly close at hand in the distinction between the beautiful and the good, but is destroyed by the co-ordination of the two as equally archetypes in a supra-sensuous world. must not however make the matter worse than it is. It is not the case that the principle of beauty, though in metaphorical passages spoken of as beautiful, was alleged to be the sole genuine beauty to the exclusion of the things of sense. Plato does not regard it as a mistake to believe in on the the beauty apparent to educated sense-perception contrary, both he and Aristotle make the acquisition of such What he perceptive capacity a main purpose of education. censures is not the belief in many beautiful things, but in many conflicting "beauties";* that is, conflicting principles or standards of beauty, V. Grantiner however that the generality of the nn. T-.., Arts Tie lesser A^. 1 and relation of whole and part misled the Greeks onna ve j^^^ making their sesthetic theory too wide in one direction, it at least encouraged them not to make it too narrow in another. If they erred by including moral and mental qualities in beauty, they did not err, as modern philosophy has been apt to, by neglecting to notice the lesser arts and handicrafts as within the region of the beautiful. Although, as we have seen, the distinction between representative and directly productive art was forcing itself into prominence in the fifth century b.c., yet no such contrast as that between art and industry had as yet entered into ordinary language ; and the profession, the trade, the craft, and the fine art, were all designated by the same term, and regarded alike as examples of reasonable systematic activity. And wherever such activity took form in objects that appealed to sense-perception, there, for the Greek philosopher, the aesthetic sphere was entered. But with regard to the content to be expressed in their varied concrete shapes, from the works of architecture and decoration and the accompanying lesser crafts of life to the great independent formative arts of painting and sculpture, theory in Hellenic antiquity takes us no deeper than the analysis which seemed adequate for the beauty of a simple
We
rî
-111/-
Republic,
V.
479 D,
"Ta
tSof jroXXSv TroXXa
voutua KaXoS re
irepi
koX ruiy
aUa)V.
EXPRESSIVE WORKMANSHIP.
curve, say, of
"
3a
a single colour or tone. of them," we read in the Republic^ at the close of the discussion on music and metre before referred to, " as well as every constructive and creative art painting, weaving, embroidery, the art of building, the manufacture of utensils, as well as the frames of animals and of plants in all of them there is grace* or the absence of grace." It is worth noticing that the beauty of animals and of plants is here mentioned in the same line with the beauty of various arts, showing how impossible it is to distinguish in any theoretical treatment between the direct perception or beauty of nature and the artistic perception or beauty of art. The limitation is remarkable as well as the inclusion. find nothing about the mountains, or the sea, or the sky, and might have risked the suggestion that the forms of inanimate nature had not caught the eye of the Greek artist and critic, were it not for the magnificent sense of cloud movement, revealed without warning or sequel by Aristophanes.* Certainly however the Greek expression for " painter" in the sense of artist a painter of living things is full of strange suggestiveness. In all this region of expressive workmanship, which we must judge not merely by its relics but by written records, aesthetic theory had nothing to point out but propriety of But in form (" grace "), rhythm, symmetry or balance. presence of concrete significance and expression all these ideas sink into postulates, that the relation of the unity to the diversity or of the whole to the part shall be right and just ; shall be, that is to say, whatever the individual import of the presentation may demand, subject to a general regard for the principle of systematic reasonableness as one that can never be neglected without loss in any sensuous or imaginative expression. Much as these postulates signified to the Greeks whose splendid composition, we are told, distinguishes their commonest work * from that of all other beauty-loving men they are in themselves, for aesthetic theory, mere abstract formulae or conditions, embodying only the fundamental fact that system is the first law of expression. in reflecting upon the most vi. And even Poetry wid the Drama. human of all arts, upon poetry and profoundly
plain moulding, or of
full
And
'
all life
is
We
^S,vaxi)ôa<ivi\. Republic, Jowett's trans., marg., p. 401. * Lectures on Art, Poynter, p. 69. 3 Clouds, 333 ff.
40
the tragic drama, Aristotle has little to say within esthetic limits that does not flow from the postulated relation of part have seen how pregnantly he succeeds in to whole.* treating this formal condition of art, and it would be wrong to depreciate the conception of dramatic unity and consistency which modern criticism inherited from him, and was long unable to appreciate in the full depth of its author's meaning. have thus seen exemplified within the limits of Greek theory that relation between formal and individual expression which was embodied in our definition of the beautiful, and which also determines the direction of progress from ancient
We
We
to
modern
aesthetic.
In music and poetry, indeed, the relation did not lend itself to a simple demarcation between two regions of each of these arts, although it expressed itself in the difiiculty of appreciatBut within the limits of ing their more complex forms. Individual formative art the distinction is tolerably plain. expressiveness emerges along with what the Greek calls " imitation," beginning above architecture and the non-representative lesser arts, with naturalistic as opposed to geometrical decoration, and becoming more and more concrete throughout the higher kinds of plastic art and painting in which the abstract conditions of reasonable expressiveness only continue to assert themselves as the principle of unity and composition. But Greek theory was necessarily unable to enrich its aesthetic analysis by the deeper spiritual content which a complete explanation of concrete beauty would have demanded, and therefore the Greek mind merely accepted the problem as one of " imitation," of somehow or other getting at reality, and
supplemented its abstract aesthetic principle which it was unable to deepen by the immature ethical and metaphysical reflections which we have considered. And these, as we saw, have at least the merit of bearing witness to the perception of certain essential relations both positive and negative between life and art, but do not contribute anything to strictly
aesthetic investigation.
4; Relation of Forto concrete tration, Beauty. Fecimer.
mai
wiU conclude this chapter with an illusdrawn from modern research, of the mode ^^^ degree in which the abstract conditions of
I
expression are in themselves symbolic of ideal content, and

*
Cf.
Phadrus, 268 D.
THE GOLDEN SECTION.
are at the same time, in virtue of the abstract and universal nature of this content, related to more concrete utterance as form to substance. Assuming for the sake of argument that observation, as Fechner thinks,^ bears out the idea that a certain type of rectangle is simply as a figure in space, and apart from any other known relations, more universally pleasant to the eye than any other rectangle, we seem compelled to suppose that it owes this property to some peculiar adequacy with which it embodies the general relation of part to whole that is, to some unique symmetry or balance of its form. If it were possible to trace the alleged preference for the "goldensection " 'rectangle, which is the type in question, to some association with utility, this would make no difference to the present argument. An association which is sufficiently universal to generate a preference that no one can discover to be biassed, is such as must be grounded in the nature of the object. In such a figure then we have an example of mathematically formal beauty. But further, many of the instances which have been Now examined by Fechner are rectangular picture-frames. here we at once come upon a possible conflict of principles. The preference for a golden-section rectangle, which depends upon its form alone, is plainly not of sufficient weight in determining the shape of a picture to counter-balance any requirements that may arise from the nature of the subject. It is not found that the same shape is thought appropriate to easel pictures even when the shape is freely chosen all while we know that almost any form of surface prescribed by an architect can be utilised with success by a master of pictorial composition. But yet it must suggest itself, as a matter of pure theory, that in a rectangular picture, a striking deviation from the rectangle which has most beauty on its own merits must 4^ entail a loss of expressiveness, which is no doubt readily compensated by the gain of higher elements of content, but,
if
quite wantonly incurred, would in
its
degree be a defect.
Fechner, Vorschule der /Esthetik, 190 ff. rectangle formed according to the golden section is a figure determined by a ratio of its sides such that the less is to the greater as the greater to the sum of the two. This ratio is roughly satisfied by 8 13, or 21 34.
1
42
I
do not now propose
to discuss the
more
subtle manifesta-
tion of the same principle of unity in the composition of the picture itself. purpose was only to give a perfectly plain
My
example of the relation in which the most formal element of beauty, having in itself a real though scanty substantive
import, stands to the concrete revelation of spiritual insight which is clothed in natural shapes. In Stothard's picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims, for example, the shape of the canvas draws its justification from the necessities of the subject, and
very obviously
sacrifices the
golden-section rectangle. compensated so as not after all to be a sacrifice is a question which will return upon us in modern aesthetic. The point which we are now endeavouring to make clear is that formal symmetry and concrete significance are not two heterogeneous elements of beauty, but are related purely as abstract and concrete. The next chapter will be devoted to tracing the advance towards a more thorough theory made by the Greek mind, at first within the outlines which have now been described, and ultimately passing beyond them.
a ( 1 7 note I ). Professor Butcher has convinced me that this passage from the Physics is not here in point. But the general meaning of /u/iiinKal tîoi (Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Art, p. I2l) bears out my statement. b (p. 19). See, however, Butcher, op. cit., viii., for the moral meaning of iimfrrla. I cannot quite admit that even so interpreted " Aristotle's phrase will include the most signiiicant of" tragic conflicts. 1 need only point to Professor Butcher's observations on the Antigone. It will be enough, perhaps, for my point to beg the reader to note that Aristotle s ideal play was the Oedipus Tyrannus, while Hegel's, for instance, was the Antigone. c (p. 28). This phrase perhaps too nearly suggests the modern conception of representative art See Butcher, op. cit., pp. 122-3, on the object of sesthetic imitation according to Aristotle ; " men in action" ; or ^9i;, Trdfli;, vpiâs. d (jj. 31). Imitation of nature in the modem sense, roughly equivalent to Plato's account of art in Rep. X. It has nothing to do with the meaning of Aristotle's identical phrase, which does not apply to fine art more than to industrial art.
slight superficial beauty of the Whether such a sacrifice can be
CHAPTER
IV.
SIGNS OF PROGRESS IN GREEK THEORY CONCERNING THE BEAUTIFUL.

the last chapter but one that Hellas was encountered by the earliest reflective criticism with a decided hostility, which was only the most primitive form of a misapprehension essentially involved in Hellenic thought. It is clear that Plato was alive to the existence of this critical antagonism, which his own views reproduced with a deeper significance. The object of the present chapter is to point out in their actual succession the most important changes by which the naive standpoint of Hellenic speculation upon beauty is at first modified paving the way for those by which, in the dawn of a later period, it is altogether transformed. The cardinal points which determined Greek theory must now be considered with reference to three antitheses, which correspond to the content of the three principles discussed in the last chapter. The antithesis of imitation and symbolism corresponds to the metaphysical principle, the antithesis of real interest and aesthetic interest to the moralistic principle, and the antithesis of abstract and concrete analysis to the
iiSitheaes.
^\ poetic
Ê
saw
in
art
in
'
aesthetic principle.
Each of these antitheses expresses a contrast between the Hellenic point of view and that of later times, and therefore indicate a direction in which modification became apparent even within the classical mode of thought. By keeping in view these leading contrasts it may be possible to preserve a degree of unity in tracing the process of modification through the speculation of successive thinkers. 2. The later pre-Socratic philosophers may be The presocratics. mentioned with reference to the first antithesis only. observed among them a hostility to imaginative art arising from a naive conception of its relation to reality ; but they also show traces of the opposite and equally one-
We
44
The interpretation of sided conception of art as allegory. hidden meanings (i-trovoia) was a Homer by the ascription of tradifamiliar phenomenon to Plato, and is ascribed by later Anaxagoras. At any rate the mythotion to the school of obviously logical phraseology of Heraclitus and Empedocles to such a conception, although it would be unhisleads up Strife, torical to suppose that the Erinyes,^ or Hephaistos, or or Friendship were for these philosophers as they would be in similar speculation to-day, names consciously drawn from the mere analogy of a different sphere, for agencies known to be purely physical. It is plain that in the allegorical interpretation of the time just preceding Plato, and in writings kindred with allegory, such as the fable, the artificial myth, and the scientific epos, the crude idea of imitation was supplemented by a reaction which itself fell into the opposite and For in allegory the reflective hardly less crude extreme. meaning and the sensuous embodiment are not fused into one, but are clearly distinguished, running in separate though Thus the allegorical expositions of Homer parallel lines. seem to have been directed to break the force of moralistic criticism, by reducing the content of the poems to a bald
scheme of abstract
truths.
is in its essence defective symbolism which form and content are at bottom indifferent symbolism in to one another and its presence whether in criticism or in production at this early period reveals a discontent with the limits of " imitation " together with an incapacity to grasp
Allegory, therefore,
the nature of concrete symbolism. 3, Assuming that the Socrates of the Memoror inyisiMe be bilia may be treated, comparatively speaking, as Imitated? ^^ historical Socrates, I notice two points of interest in his recorded ideas. a. It is exceedingly remarkable with reference to the first antithesis that he directly raises ^ the question " Whether the The invisible to which he refers invisible can be imitated." of mental moods, such as good and bad temper, and consists these, he is reported to have argued in discussion with Parrhasinus, can be rendered by means of the expression of the face,
" If the sun leaves his path, the Erinyes,
allies
of justice, will find
him
out."
*
Heraclitus, Ritter and Pr. no. Xen., Memor., iii. 10.
37.
SOCRATES.
45
and more
particularly through the look of the eyes. It is also remarkable that he lays stress on the artistic expression of vitality.^ Although these suggestions do not profoundly modify the idea of imitative representation for common usage would quite allow that anger is through its effects an object of sense-perception, yet the formulation " Is the unseen
imitable ? " is at least suggestive and the demand for " expression " in pictorial art is an important anticipation of later theory. The view of Socrates as to the capacity of painting is not quite in agreement with that of Aristotle, which it appears to have suggested by opposition. It may be added that the necessity for something more than sheer imitation is recognised by him through the crude conception of gathering together, from different originals, In elements of beauty which nowhere exist in combination. so early a period this idea is interesting, because it shows the consciousness that art needs in some way to bring a deeper insight to bear upon reality than untrained perception can supply. As a formal theory in later times it is simply tedious, being obviously no more than the first uncriticised
;
shape of a very simple postulate.

iEstaietic
and
Eeai Interest.
that
is,
an
Socrates to the question, /8, The attitude of " j-j^g ^ beautiful thing as such a real interest ? " interest relative to a practical or to an appetitive
purpose, is so far as we know uncritical, although the course of his thought may remind us of a feature in that of Kant. He refused, so we are told, to contemplate the possibility that beauty could exist except as relative to a purpose. To us, such relativity appears to destroy the aesthetic point of view, and the conception of beauty. It is well however to remember how naturally the postulate of reasonable system, which is the fundamental aesthetic requirement, takes shape The addition in the conception of teleological relativity. as the character suggested by Kant when he describes beauty of adaptation to a purpose without relation to an actual purpose is probably a very fair gloss on the immature idea of Both Plato and Aristotle are in advance of relative beauty.
the Socratic standpoint in this respect.

in which these qualities are led up to in Xen., I.e., as something and XP"/*" leaves no doubt in my mind that Plotinus, in whom the sequence of terms is exactly the same, was much indebted to this, passage in the Memorabilia.
1
The way
beyond
<rv/A/ierpia
46
4.
It is hard to elicit much of definite historical {ôm the traditions that refer to early Pythagoreanism. It seems certain, however, on the authority of Aristotle that philosophers known as Pythagoreans had pursued mathematical investigations with success, but had interlytnaeoreanism.
^^^^
preted some of their results after the manner of mysticism. It is also definitely asserted that the numerical relations of the musical scale were discovered by them. a. With reference to the antithesis between ^^ "'" imitation and symbolism, the habit of a mystical interpretation of numerical relations and also the habit of referring musical effects to mathematical relations, opened a wide pathway of escape from the idea of common sensuous reality as ultimate standard and original.^ More especially, such investigations no doubt influenced the view on which Plato and Aristotle, we shall find, were substantially agreed as to the pre-eminent moral import of music. According to Aristotle ^ the Pythagoreans actually treated number as the original of which things were " imitations," an expression which Plato superseded, so Aristotle continues, by the phrase " participation " meaning that they exist by participation in abstractions and not as representations of them. This shows us how boldly the term " imitation " was capable of being applied, but also that Plato was inclined on the whole to introduce a somewhat greater strictness into the usage. Passing over the second antithesis /8, which does not concern us here, we may notice that 7- The genesis of aesthetic criticism, through a Concrete Analysis, j-ca-l hope and conviction that the principle of unity could be applied in the analysis of shape, rhythm, melodies, organic existences, was due in great measure to the prospect opened up by the progress of geometrical science and of elementary mathematical acoustics. The idea that a musical effect or symmetrical figure could be shown to owe its charm to a mathematical relation, having itself, probably, a further significance more or less justifiably imputed to it, plainly animated the scientific imagination much as the physical theory of light and sound has animated it in the present day. Plato's* account of the science of "harmony," analogous, I
;
See Timaus,
p. 80.
Metaph., A. 5 and
6.
Republ., vii.
530
ff.
SYMBOLISM IN PLATO.
47
presume, rather to acoustics than to counterpoint, and of the different classes of students who pursue it, some of them -experimentahsts and some mathematicians, shows that the attempt at detailed analysis of musical effect was no new thing, and his own suggestions were obviously encouraged by the consciousness of a scientific movement in the direction. However mystic might be its accessory ideas, still the enthusiastic conviction that form and number underlie the structure of the universe imparted a comprehensiveness and audacity to critical analysis such as, on a very different plane of actual knowledge, characterises modern speculation. It must be borne in mind that the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. were a period of genuine advance in mathematical theory. The life of Euclid falls about the close of the 4th century, and the knowledge embodied in his Elements of Geometry was growing up, partly by the researches of the " Pythagoreans," may mention through the previous two hundred years. in this context the tradition that a canon, or rule of abstract proportions, was embodied by Polycleites in his statue of the Enquiry into proportional relations is one Doryphoros.^ thing, the substitution of an abstract rule for creative percepIt is not at all impossible however tion in art is another.
We
that the two were confused, as is constantly the case in the theory of practical men, and that thus the analysis of an abstraction was made to do duty for the analytic criticism of concrete expressiveness. 5- In Plato we see both the completed system of Greek theory concerning art, and, side by side with this, the conceptions that were destined to break' it down. a. When we found that the idea of symbolism, sm. sym ^j^^^ .^^ ^^ ^j^^ embodiment of invisible realities in sensuous form, is conspicuous by its absence from Plato's explicit theory of representative art, our conclusion ought to have For, in the growing rebellion against excited some surprise. a natural monism, fostered by abstract science on the one hand, and by abstract mysticism on the other, Plato appeared
as the prophet of a dualism between nature and intelligence, or sense or spirit, which might be said to have had the effect of turning the whole perceptible universe into a symbol of It is difficult not to suppose that later European ideas.
Overbeck, Schriftquellen, 953
ff.
48
theology, to which fine art became so profoundly related, has its ultimate source in the great simile of the Republic by which the Sun and its light are conceived as the offspring and symbol of the absolute good and its manifestation or utterance.
And
in
a somewhat different arrangement of the same scheme,
the only-begotten universe of the Timesus, the god perceptible to sense, who is the image of the ultimate reason, also suggests ideas which were destined to become for centuries the principal content of symbolic imagination. But by Plato himself this connection was not established. Images and imagination, for him, rank below nature and science. What he cares about, as every sympathetic student must feel, is reality at first-hand and the generalization that representative art is reality at second-hand is still fresh and serious in his mind. Thus the conceptions from which a new symbolic art was one day to spring do not coalesce with his theory of the rank and aim of artistic creation. This need not be less true even if the Platonic myths are genuine works of poetic imagination. No one doubts that the great art of Hellas in fact contained a symbolic element ; but our inquiry deals mainly with the conscious theory of it, and on this the artistic creations of the theorist himself throw little more light than any other works which might be known to him. But although the myths are by no means pur^ allegories, they are rather allegorical than symbolic. They are not exactly fables like those of ^sop, nor apologues like Prodicus' Choice of Herakles, but they resemble these stories in being subservient to conveying abstract ideas, the pictorial embodiment of which is expressly admitted to be indifferent. " man of sense ought not to say," the Platonic Socrates concludes the great myth of the Phsedo, " nor will I be too confident, that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true," Poetry, in the strict sense, cannot distinguish so coolly between the content and the form.
;
Thus we can hardly admit that the myths are genuine examples of symbolic art we should rather look for such art
;
as this in the simple human drama of the dialogues, in their pathos, humour, and portraiture. But this, as has been implied,
It is
throws no real light on Plato's theory of beauty. important however to note that Plato was familiar
PROGRESS IN PLATO,
49
good sense
with the idea of allegorical interpretation.^ But this, as his rejected such a method of arriving at the meaning of great poets, seems rather to have indisposed him towards a spiritual interpretation of art than to have recommended such a conception to his mind. On the other hand we may observe in Plato a few distinct theoretical deviations from the doctrine which restricts representative art to the imitation of commonplace reality. Enough was Said, in the last chapter, of the *' Formal Beauty. general analysis of formal beauty as embodying the principle of unity. This analysis was applicable, in Plato's mind, to all arts and crafts as well as to natural objects, and he actually employs the word "imitation" to express their embodiment of spiritual ideas in sensuous form.* iiIn the case of music this is especially reunsicai
symboUBm. markable to a modern reader, and when we are told' that certain rhythms, and, apparently, certain melodies, are " imitations " of certain types of life or temper, we feel that the limit between the image and the symbol is over-
stepped.
for
No
doubt
it
him
this distinct expressive capacity,

in narrative
was only very simple music which had and it is not difficult
from the idea of reprosuch tunes or songs as a man of a certain character would willingly use, i.e. an imitation in pari materia, of sound by sound, to the consideration of the tune or rhythm reproduced in its direct relation to the mood of the man
ducing
to trace in his discussion a transition
whose
feelings
it
expresses.
We
is
shall see that Aristotle

^^
'^^
goes
still
further in the
same
direction.
Beauty wuch
"'"
'^^'^
worth remembering that outside

is
more
formai
Plato's definite theory of art the beautiful
princi-
spoken of as the manifestation of intelligence,* and the idea of poetic inspiration which earlier literature had possessed, and which the criticism of imitation had perhaps unduly thrust aside, is adopted by him with varying degrees of irony,* but always, probably, with a sound psychological insight that the creative and critical genius are distinct, and that the apprehension of truth which belong to creative imagination is other than that which proceeds by methodic reason.
pgÛy
*
Republic, 378 1). Cratylus, 416.
Republic,
^
* Republic, iii. 400 B and D. iii. 401. Pheedrus, 245 A; Laws, 719 C; Meno, 99 D.
50
But these suggestions were not reconciled with the general explanation of representative art, and the poet and artist rank in Plato's eyes many degrees^ below the true lover of beauty, who is on a level with the philosopher. Thus it has even been maintained that for Plato fine art falls outside the province of the beautiful.^ We have already seen under what
recognised that in fact limitations this assertion is true. the expression of ideal contents was especially noticeable in the works of man, but his theory of representation prevented him from founding upon this observation any definite notion
of the beautiful as revealed more especially in art. Estimation of beauty according to a practical /8. iEsthetio Interest interest is as we saw equally unsesthetic, whether Not that pleasure, in the* interest is moral or sensuous. the ordinary sense of the term, as descriptive of pleasant feeling, for in saying that we mean indicates an unaesthetic interest a thing to afford pleasure we only say that we mean it to please and the question now raised is more concrete than this, and the answer depends upon whether the pleasure is expected to arise from the sheer expressive effect of the aesthetic appearance, or from purposes or associations connected with the existence of the real objects of which that
;
He
appearance reminds us. Therefore we must not look for Plato's attitude towards
which he too frequently draws between art which has for its object to give pleasure, and art which might have for its object to produce moral improvement. Although, as we saw in the last chapter,* the demand of early criticism for moral elevation in art implies a sound judgment on the substantive relation of beauty to life,
true aesthetic interest in the contrast
yet when we are estimating the progress of aesthetic theory proper, we must not recognise moral improvement as an It is aesthetic interest any more than the pleasures of vice. within the region of pleasurable presentation, as conrather ceived by Plato, and in the contrast between pure and impure modes and conditions of such presentation, that we must look for something corresponding to the antithesis which we have
in mind.
But this contrast again is apt to be presented in a way which does not directly answer our question. Pure pleasures,
1
Phadnis, 248 E.
* Schasler,
i.
89.
' Cf.
also Nettleship in Helleniea.
BEAUTY AND PLEASURE.
51
such as according to Plato arise from true beauty, are free, no doubt, from selfish interest in the bad sense of the words thus much is clear but whether they are distinct from the plea;
;
surable side of the nobler real affections and volitions is often by no means clear. Impure pleasures, again, are full of sensuous, and even of painful or uneasy interest but whether they are separated from the pleasures of true beauty because they are relative to real desires (as morality also is), or because qua pleasures they are disfigured by uneasiness, or only in so far as they are conceived to be of an immoral type
;
this is
as extreme examples of Plato's leanings in these two directions, first the above-quoted passage from the iPhilebus^ relating to the beauty of form or unity; and secondly that in the Gorgias dealing with musical and tragic art, through an ironical comparison of them with the routine denied to be an art of cookery.* For instance, " and to what does their solemn sister [sister of choric and dithyrambic poetry, musical execution has also been mentioned], the wondrous muse of tragedy, devote herself.? Is all her aim and desire only to give pleasure to the spectators, or does she fight against and refuse to speak of their pleasant vices, and willingly proclaim in word and song truths welcome and unwelcome Which is her character " There can be no doubt that Tragedy has her face turned towards pleasure and gratification. " And is not that the sort of thing which we were just now describing as flattery In the Philebus it is assumed, and in the Gorgias implicitly denied, that pleasure is at least an essential element of the characteristic impression for which beauty ought to be valued. But in the passage in which this is assumed, the pleasure in question is strictly limited with reference i. To the kind of sense-perception which can give rise to it the perceptions of eye and ear only, with a doubtful inclusion, on a lower level, of the sense of smell and, ii. To the cases in which these sense-perceptions can give rise to the characteristic pleasures of formal beauty ; cases that are free from the uneasiness of desire, and, as above explained, are distinguished
We may take
by no means
plain.
.*
.?
.*
by
their symbolic character.

*
See
p. 33, supra.
Gorgias, pp. 501, 502.
52
The demarcation between
the aesthetic and
non-sesthetic
Hippias Major ^ which, if senses, strongly insisted on as showing a growth of definite ideas spurious, is interesting on this point, is a fair indication that the boundary between aesthetic and non-aesthetic interest is coming into view. Negatively, the "theoretic senses" are not connected with material consumption of the thing perceived, and positively, they and no others, with the doubtful exception of touch and muscular sense, have the capacity for the recognition of structural totality, the first condition, as we have seen, of the expressiveness in which beauty consists. The doubtful inclusion of smell most emphatically illustrates the genesis of the disIf we judge by " purity " in Plato's, tinction in Plato's mind. meaning, viz. as freedom from the intermittent unpeculiar easiness of desire, the pleasures of smell are pure if we judge
in the
;
by purity
sense of significant unity or concentrated energy as revealed in the expressive character of a presentation,* the pleasures of smell are not pure, but are as a rule mere occurrences in the way of pleasurable sensation. If then, in the passage from the Gorgias referred to, the fault ascribed to art were nothing more than that what it aims at and generates is pleasure, we should find a discrepancy between the two passages. But the aim ascribed and condemned in the Gorgias is pleasure as such, which means, as Plato seems rightly to insist with all his force, pleasure at any " Cookery," he says (it is cookery price and in anything.* with which poetry and music are being ironically compared, as equally forms of "flattery," i.e. mere provision of the pleasant) " in attending upon pleasure never regards either the nature or reason of that pleasure to which she devotes Iierj^^ nor ever considers nor calculates anything." This comparison shows that the satisfaction of real desire is not far from Plato's mind as the ground to be alleged against the nobleness of the concrete arts. It is exceedingly suggestive that in order to carry out this comparison he proposes to divest poetry of its poetic form, and consider simply its
in the
is, to change it from art into something else. But he does not name this ground, and passes on to the old
matter, that
'
* '
Hipp. Major, 297-8. See Ruskin's Modem Painters, Gorgias, 501 A., Jowett.
vol.
ii.,
on
Purity.
THE LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL.
53
antithesis of pleasure-giving as an aim, contrasted with moral improvement, so that he himself actually approves as the purpose of art not an aesthetic but a real, i.e. a moral interest. The conclusion must be that Plato has a clear view of aesthetic as distinct from real interest only in so far as he recognises a peculiar satisfaction attending the very abstract mani-
In those concrete forms of representation which we think the higher arts, he was unable to distinguish the pleasure of expressiveness from the practical interest of morality, which he desired to see predominant, and from the pleasure of realistic suggestion which he utterly
festations of purely formal beauty.
condemned. This view of Plato's meaning is not, in my judgment, to be very seriously impugned on the ground of the noble account,
several times repeated in the dialogues, of beauty as the object of educated love.^ The question is whether the feeling for beauty so described is to be understood as a real enthusiasm
an for an idea, or even for a person sublimed into an idea, enthusiasm such as demands the reality or realization of its object or as an ideal delight in a perfectly concrete sensuous pure affecappearance which charms as an appearance only. enthusiasm for the tion for a good and attractive friend, or an cause of order or of knowledge, is likely to be attended by refined perceptions, but it is not in itself the same thing as a Again, a delight in the expressive force feeling for beauty. of perfectly concrete fancies or appearances independent of the real practical existence of the objects corresponding to them, can hardly indeed exist except in a mind of large and noble purposes, but is not in itself an affection for any actual If Plato's person, or enthusiasm for any actual cause. an abstract purpose or principle, his "love of "beauty" is beauty " is a refined enthusiasm for real purposes or principles " beauty " is a value or import felt in the world of senseif his perception when taken simply as expressive and not as a means to any end, then, and then only, his love of beauty is of an aesthetic delight not concerned with the real existence
its
objects.
It is plain that
both these elements enter into the Platonic distinguished. love-philosophy, and that they are not as a rule The former belongs to abstract and the latter to concrete
1
tii
Symposium;
Rep.,
iii. ;
Phaedrus.
54
idealism for if beauty is out of the sensuous world, it is undistinguishable from the object of will and knowledge while if it is in the sensuous world, it belongs to a perfectly definite Plato's thought undoubtsphere of appreciative perception. What we have edly alternated between these two extremes. to bear in mind is that moral purity in the purpose of art or beauty does not constitute aesthetic purity, though moral 'impurity in the purpose of art or beauty does constitute Isesthetic impurity. It is further worth remarking that Plato had observed the special connection between imagination and emotion,^ and was not wholly unaware that free utterance of passion^ might bring relief and calm, and again that the representative arts might be contrasted with the practical arts as play^ with earnest. This latter conception, invested with profound import in modern times by the genius of Schiller, is in Plato a natural accompaniment of the view which makes the representation an inferior species of the reality, as when we say contemptuously of a dilettante that he is only playing at work. Yet this, like so much of the groundplan of Plato's thought, was full of possibilities which only needed a larger experience of spiritual needs and achievements to become realities. Concrete 7. The last observation calls upon us to notice oritioiflma. jhe immense substantive contribution made by Plato to the material for a true concrete criticism. For real advance in the theory of a great subject it is less important that a thinker's verdicts should be unimpeachable than that
;
he should have gathered into a connected whole the right kind of experience and treated it in a way that suggests the most important issues. Plato has sketched the fabric of aesthetic experience on a coherent plan, which subsequent history has proved to be in accordance with the nature of the phenomena. He left to those who came after him the definite conception that there is a group of representative or imaginative arts consisting in chief of sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, with the addition of architecture and its auxiliary handicrafts, which are united with one another at least by a common difference from the merely useful productive trades, and the value ot which presents a problem to those who care for the highest
*
Rep.,
X.,
606 D.
Laws, 790.
Laws, 889.
DATA AS LEFT BY PLATO.
55
concerns of life. The chief points of view under which Plato attempted to penetrate the significance of these phenomena have already been set forth. It only remains to state that
in spite of the abstract limitations within which he worked the mass of experience to which he called attention was such as to lay a sound foundation for a more concrete criticism than his own. He gave a raison dHre to the distinction of
and dramatic poetry, not in itself new, by analysis^ turning on their respective degrees of dramatic personification he pointed out that a tragedy is an organic whole,^ and not a string of speeches expressive of various morals he made an attempt of which the import is largely lost to us, but the suggestion is still valuable, to determine the ethical and symbolic affinities of metres melodies and other features* of the vocal and instrumental music of his day he pointed out, though primarily as a proof of remoteness from reality, that the painter's third dimension* is ideal and not actual he insisted, as we have seen, on a symbolic value, though only of a very abstract and simple kind, as shared by all the formative handicrafts including architecture, with the more elaborate representative arts, and explained it more especially in the case of geometrical figures and simple tones and colours. The mere distinction, which was mentioned just above, of the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic senses, bequeathed to later philosophy a problem of extreme interest and difficulty, while the place assigned to beauty in education bears witness to the philosopher's practical feeling for it as the sensuous representative of reason, and has recently revived as one of the profoundest guiding ideas of modern life. Thus Plato's philosophic instinct enabled him to gather and organize an experience which suggested far more than was included in his abstract aesthetic theory, and to set the problems which only a more concrete criticism could solve. 6. It is needless to enter at length into the twiceAtiBtotie. j^y jg^jg ^ jjjg general relation in which Aristotle stood to Hellenic life and thought. If there never was a greater intelligence, certainly no intelligence had ever a nobler opportunity. In the sphere of realized beauty with which we are here concerned, not only had the greatest works already
epic,, lyric,
; ;
;
Rep.,
i-iii. 3.
;
2 Phcedrus, 268.
' Hep., i-iii.
Timceies,
80 B.
Rei>., x.
56
been produced, and attained complete recognition,^ but an after-prime had subsequently set in, the nature of which could
And for this reto stimulate theoretical reflection. complete, but had been in flection the material was not only Thus to the great part organized by the thought of Plato.
not
fail
greatest of originators there succeeded the greatest of investigators. a. First, then, in conformity with our previous symbousm. jj^g^j^^j^ ^^ ^^ê to inquire how far Aristotle may have modified the essential Hellenic idea that only such reality as pleases in ordinary experience is that by the reproduction of which fine art hopes to please how far, in other words, the differentia " imitative," which he does not discard from the
;
definition of art, retains for
him
its
natural
meaning of copying
be
copied.
something which
is
such that
it
can
Does
" imitation " in Aristotle lean at all to " symbolism " ? It is important that we should notice what iSelection of Fuenomena. sesthetic phenomena chiefly attracted his attention.
In Esthetic, as in other branches of philosophy, is the earliest writer to leave us a separate treatise. But its title of Poetic confines its immediate subject matter to literature, and within literature to the art of invention or composition, usually though not necessarily in verse, of which three principal kinds, Epic, Tragedy, and Comedy, formed the heads of the discussion. Music is alluded to only as an incident The arts of acting and of the rhapsode are referred of poetry. to as essentially outside the arts of drama and epic respectively so that although these classes of poetry are considered throughout with reference to the feelings of an audience or of spectators, yet we are not wrong in saying that they are Lyrical poetry has as yet no essentially treated as literature. single name, and is not recognised as a species. Formative art, including Architecture and the lesser decorative crafts,- fall outside the scope of the treatise, although painting is alluded Observations upon to more than once by way of illustration. music and painting occur in other writings but there is no systematic inquiry into the pleasure arising from these arts. Aristotle's treatment of the subject is therefore not co-extensive
Aristotle
;
;
1 As in the law of Lycurgus providing that statues of the three great tragedians should be erected, and that correct MSS. of their dramas should be prepared and preserved.
IMITATION INNATE.
57
with the philosophy of Fine Art. How far such a philosophy can be gathered from him will appear as we proceed. But if his selection of phenomena is baulking to our curiosity, which would have welcomed his criticism of the Parthenon pediment-sculpture or of the Phigaleian frieze, it is timinently favourable to advance in aesthetic science. For it is most particularly the poetry of Hellas that we cannot possibly reconcile with the formal aesthetic theory natural to Greek thought, which finds some justification in its monumental sculpture and its temple architecture. In technical language, an inquiry into Greek epic, tragedy, and comedy, must at least include elements belonging to the aesthetic theory of the sublime and the ugly and it would be impos;
sible to penetrate far into these distinctively modern provinces of aesthetic without throwing off the subjection of art to that The treatment of which pleases in everyday perception. comedy in the Poetic, of which the details are unhappily lost, was therefore in principle a most important extension of Plato's
reference to the drama. In conformity with the choice of subject matii. The giy. ^^^ j^ ^^ remark ^ that the laughable is a subdivithe laughable being the subject of comedy, sion .of the ugly and therefore falling within fine art and its essential quality the beautiful, though I do not affirm that Aristotle was aware of this implied paradox. And more consciously suggestive, in the same direction, is the observation, frequently and emphatically repeated, and extended to the whole sphere of " imitative " art, that an imitation is often agreeable though the I quote a characthing imitated or copied is disagreeable. with the attempt at explanation teristic passage in this sense,
is entirely due to two First, consisting in natural tendencies. causes, both of them human beings, as we see from childhood imitation is innate in upward, and man differs from other animals in being so given
which the phenomenon elicits.^ "It seems that the origin of poetry
to imitation, and his earliest acquisition of knowledge is by means of imitation ; and pleasure in imitation too is innate in There is evidence of this in the facts for we take all men. pleasure in looking at the most carefully executed pictures of
;
things which in
1
themselves
we
dislike to look at,
such as
Poetic, 5, I.
* Poetic, 4.
58
An( the forms of the most ignoble animals, or of corpses. not only men of scienc< secondly," there is this cause, that enjoy the exercise of apprehension, but the rest of mankinc So this i; enjoy it too only their capacity for it is limited. likenesses of things, because it why they enjoy seeing the an incident of seeing them that they apprehend and infer wha each thing is, as for instance 'This is he;' for if thi spectator has never seen the thing before it will not be th< imitation '] which will cause the^ pleasure, bu likeness [lit. the execution or the colour or some such reason." The seconc " cause " is meant to be an explanation of the first, as th< " Since the use of the intelligence following passage shows.^ and the feeling of wonder, are both of them pleasant, i necessarily follows that things are pleasant which are of th< class of mimetic art, such as painting and statuary and poetr] [it is most remarkable in connection with what will be sai( below, that music is here omitted] and everything which i: well imitated, even when the object itself is not pleasant For it is not the object which gives the pleasure, but infer ence takes place that This is that,' so that an exercise o the intelligence is brought about." The phenomenon thus insisted on opens up vistas that leac How far did Aristotk to romantic art and modern theory. are here face to face witl appreciate its significance? the recurring problem set by the apparent simplicity o. shall see below that a rough anc Aristotle's thought. ready interpretation of his terms, by merely converting then into their current equivalents, will certainly at times lead ui astray. Yet where the text gives no hint of subtlety, it car hardly be right to import it. Literally understood, the abov passages account for the pleasure which we take in representations of the unpleasant, by our enjoyment of the intellectua. act and achievement involved in simply recognising the objeci portrayed. And of the existence of such a pleasure there isnc doubt whatever.^ But it is plain that by merely pressing upor the meaning of the term imavdaveiv, " to apprehend," and arvWoyiêa-dat, " to infer," we might introduce such a conception as thai of entering with full appreciation into the idea, perhaps even into
;
i;
'
'
We
We
1 * etc.
Met:, 1371 b, 4. See Fra Lippo Lippi
"
The monks
closed in a circle and praised loud,''
IDEAL IN ARISTOTLE.
59,
the mood, embodied in the artistic representation. In this case we should have reached an explanation to which modern theory has little to add. Aristotle's omission to refer to mood or emotion makes in my judgment strongly for the former alternative ; and it is almost impossible, so it seems at least to the modern reader, to over-estimate the naivete of Greek criticism. But though in the present case I believe the less pregnant interpretation to be nearer the truth, we shall see below that we are skating on thin ice when we prefer the more superficial explanation of Aristotle. It should be needless to remind the reader that no Greek term with all its content and associations can by any possibility find a precise equivalent in any English term ; and we are not entitled to argue stricdy from any single rendering, but we must consider how much ground a simple term may have covered before the necessity for more subtle phrases was perceived. However this may be, it is clear that the fascination of ugliness in representative art was a newly observed phenomenon in contradiction with the simple assumption that the representation affects us as does the corresponding reality. Not the content of the likeness, but something, whatever it might be, involved in the fact of its being a likeness at all, was thus suggested to be the secret of its attraction. iiiWhen we read in the Poetics'^ that "poetry* Poetry
Phuosopuc.
is
more philosophical
"
(or
scientific)
and more
are apt to imagine ourselves in a modern atmosphere and certainly the remark shows a recognition of the ideal in art quite foreign to Plato. Yet when we observe that this principle is introduced as an inference from the postulate of unity in the plot or action of a drama, that this single and self-complete action is more or less contrasted with the portrayal of human individuality, and that the " scientific " element of poetry lies in its typical generality, we are obliged to doubt whether the idealisation thus acknowledged is more akin to the formal limitations or to the positive greatness of Greek drama. If Aristotle, as the sequel of the above passage appears to indicate, really preferred on this ground the enfeebled later comedy of types and manners ^ to the pregnant Aristophanic comedy of humour and portraitsatire, his ideas are far less kindred to ours than his language.
;
serious than history
we
Poet, 9,
3.
See Poet,
5, 3,
with reference to Crates.
6o
It will
be necessary to recur to this point when we come at to consider his attitude towards concrete characterisation present it is enough to note how clearly he enunciates the principle that representation is not to be wholly fettered by given reality. iv. It will be remembered that the Xenophontic Musical symDoiism. Socrates discussed the possibility of a presentation of the unseen by formative art, and instanced the indicaIn Plato all art is tion of mental moods by look and feature. regarded as capable of being thus significant, but attention is draw^n more especially to the expressive capacities of music and rhythm.^ In Aristotle we find that the presentation of mental or moral moods is in the strict sense ascribed only to music and poetry, to the explicit exclusion of the relation between formative art^ and mental emotions. For these, according to Aristotle, are in pictorial art only indicated through external symptoms, such as gesture and complexion, which do not constitute in themselves any resemblance to the mental feelings. But musical tunes, and words accompanied by music, "contain in ^-^^zm^^/z/^j likenesses [ lit. 'imitations'] of moral moods." Such expressions certainly seem to convey an intentional exclusion of the view which Socrates suggested, and an intentional restriction of that adopted by Plato. " Imitation " is thus not merely extended over but confined to the expressive relation, of whatever kind, by which feeling passes directly into rhythm and melody. Compare with this the very significant suggestion in his jottings of problems for inquiry, " Why does what is heard alone of the objects of sense possess emotional import ?* for even a tune without words has it but colour [as such,* apart from indirect portrayal by its means], and smell and taste have none." Then is imitation at last freed from " likeness " to a sensuous reality, and have we here, in essence, the romantic conception of music as a direct embodiment of spiritual emotion I hardly think so. Aristotle's central proof that music directly
; ;
.?
400 B. 919 b, 26. simple phrase exa ^5os

1
Rep.,
ii.
' Probl.,
2 /j,/^ 1340; cf. Laws, 654-5. 8ia Ti TO dKouo-TW ftjovov exec ijôs twv aux6iyr5tv.
The
a good example of Aristotle's curtness. Our rendering of this phrase determines our whole ideas of his aesthetic. * The strictness of this reference to colour has an affinity with Kant. The
is
truth of the opinion expressed in the text
is
at least doubtful.
NATURE AND ART.
contains the essence of emotion is that in practice it produces emotion, particular tunes giving rise, it would seem, to particular forms of excitement,' just as the music of the dance or the march or the hymn reproduces certain elementary feelings and active tendencies almost with the certain operation of a drug. The movement of the music, I suspect he meant, when contrasting it with the indirect expression of painting, is the actual movement ^ of the mind or impulses which arises when the music is heard. So far then from " imitation" being here refined into the aesthetic idea of symbolism, it might even be doubted whether what it describes is an aesthetic effect at all, if, by an aesthetic effect, we mean not merely response to a stimulus but pleasure in an expression. But Aristotle loves to work upwards from physical fact to its ideal import and we shall probably be near the truth if we say that, starting from the fact of involuntary response to musical stimulus, he accepted an analogical kinship between moral emotion and musical expression such as Plato had already insisted on, and that therefore he did, as we should certainly judge at first sight, admit a symbolic elementMnto his idea of "imitative" representation, while excluding from it the simple case of copying by formative art. V. Finally it may be observed that there is at Artcoirective of Nature, f^^st siglit a Striking resemblance in the analogy which Aristotle saw between Art and Nature,' to some postKantian speculations. But for our present purpose it must be borne in mind that though Nature is in both schemes likened to an inferior art, yet in Aristotle the art which makes good the imperfections of Nature is industrial^ as \ opposed to the copyist art which reproduces her creations.' There is here no hint whatever that the art which represents is entitled, in modern phrase, " to liberate the real import of appearances " * from the falsities of commonplace reality. Our conclusion then must be that Aristotle was driven to stretch the idea of imitation, but that he did not reject it in favour of the idea of symbolism. Given reality was still for him the standard, but he saw the difference which treatment produced in it he saw that it must be idealised. This is a position fairly in accordance with the apparent actual process
;
Pol., I.C.
cont.
Prohl,
I.e.
^vo-.,
198.
See Introd. to Hegel's ysthetic, Eng. Trans.,
p. 15.
62
of
art,
but ultimately inconsistent with itself, and unstable. For, if given reality is the standard, what is to indicate the The true answer, "a direction in which it is to be idealised ? kypothesi so long as given reality deeper reality," is excluded ex The unaesthetic answer, "morality is the is the standard. guide," is terribly obvious, and I cannot think that Aristotle wholly escaped its influence.^ The answer of abstract aesthetic, "Unity and symmetry are the rules," is the confusion of fundamental abstract conditions of art with its concrete content, and suggests to us ideal trees that are no trees in particular, and ideal dramas whose chief concern is to observe the unities. How far in detail Aristotle escaped this confusion, towards which the limitations of his aesthetic tended to force him, we In the meantime it shall endeavour to determine below. seems that his conception of fine art in its relation to nature* may be fairly summed up as the idealising imitation of given reality. are now to ask how far Aristotle escapes i. Aestnetio intsrest. from the moralistic limitation natural to Hellenic theory, by recognising the demarcation of the peculiar pleasure afforded by beauty from all satisfaction attaching to practical relations with reality, whether moral, non-moral, or immoral. When we turn to his general utterances on ! Beauty, virtue and Pleasure, ^j^g subject of beauty, we find distinctions obviously of the nature in question but, after Aristotle's manner, each element of the distinction is only insisted on for the purpose of the moment, so that what is clear in one passage seems obscured in another. Where it is maintained that mathematics^ can treat of attributes that belong to beauty, the beautiful is distinguished from the good where the mean life ' is contrasted with the noble life, beauty is distinguished from expediency, but is identified with a form of the good where sexual preference * is being contrasted with aesthetic selection, real beauty is distinguished from beauty which only has reference to desire. Thus the boundary between the beautiful and the merely pleasant is more firmly maintained than that between the beautiful and the moral and we are disappointed to find in the context of the most attractive definition of beauty given by
We
See ch.
iii.
above.
Metaph., 1078.
s Rhet.^
1350.
ProbL, 896 b.
BEAUTY AND EDUCATION.

Aristotle
63
cause
it is
good
" the beautiful ^ is that good which is pleasant be" that virtue is explicitly included under the
head of the beautiful. Nevertheless it is probably thus classified not on moralizing grounds, but as possessing a certain immediate splendour analogous to the beauty of sense.^ We see, however, that the differentia which should confine the beautiful to the province of sense and imagination is conspicuous by its absence, except in as far as it is implied in the amount of attention devoted to " imitative " art. There can be little doubt that Aristotle, if led to define beauty in all its relations at once, would have traced its frontier satisfactorily. But he has not, in fact, left us a systematic treatment of the general subject, and does not seem to have
conceived such a treatment in his own mind. " It has beer^ suggested ^ that Aristotle's interEducational interest It is true ggt ju beauty was mainly educational. that the chief account which he gives of music and drawing
occurs in the educational sections of the Politics. But we must remember that to introduce aesthetic interest into education is not the same as to introduce educational interest into aesthetic. The former Aristotle certainly did at least in one instance how far he did the latter may be best discussed in connection with his celebrated definition of tragedy. The noble saying which is Aristotle's criticism upon the received estimate of drawing as an element in education, is a proof that he regarded education as incomplete without an Drawing is to attempt to develop true aesthetic perception. be taught, he suggests,* not merely to impart skill in estimating the commercial value of articles, but because it makes the How far a pupils good observers of the beauty of objects. discussion of the similar aesthetic interest is indicated in the aims with which music is to be taught depends largely on our interpretation of the definition of tragedy, which is echoed in It is plain, indeed, that Arispart of the educational inquiry. totle values both music and drama, not only as an educationist for their effect on character, but as a man of the world for The question is as to their recreative and social function.
;
the precise nature of the higher recreation as understood him.

'
by
2 See Rhet., 1366. Ulrici, in Muller, 2, i8r.
above on Beautiful Soul,

* Pol., 1338.
p.
37.
64
ill.
It will
before us in connection with the only account of a f^^^ ^^ jj^jg hig^gr recreation which has been preserved to us at all completely as it came from Aristotle's hand. The celebrated definition of Tragedy in the Materials ftom Aristotle. Poetics may, I believe, be fairly paraphrased as
of
The Function
Tragedy,
be well now to consider the question
follows.
"
an action noble
Tragedy is a representation [lit. imitation] of and complete in itself, and of appreciable
magnitude, in language of special fascination, using different kinds of utterance in the different parts, given through performers and not by means of narration, and producing, by (the stimulation of) pity and fear, the alleviating discharge of
emotions of that nature."
Of
these defining terms, "noble"
distinguishes the subject-matter which tragedy shares with epic from that, viz. forms of the inferior or ugly, which comedy shares with satire. " Complete in itself" refers to the demand for organic unity of structure, having beginning, middle and end, which is the only form of unity strictly demanded by Unity of time is alluded to only in the remark that Aristotle. the action of tragedy is confined as a rule to one day or little " Of appreciable more unity of place is not mentioned. magnitude " refers to the necessity that a beautiful thing should be readily apprehended in its parts and also as a whole. " Language of special fascination " refers to the employment of rhythm and melody "with different kinds of utterance " to the difference between iambic declamation and choric song " given through performers " distinguishes drama from epic it is noticeable, however, that Aristotle admits that a drama can be judged of by reading. The remaining portion of the definition has been the subject of much controversy, which Space forbids me will never perhaps be finally laid to rest. to defend at length the rendering which I have adopted with I merely mention, on account of its surpasfull conviction.^ sing historical interest, the fact that Lessing, in harmony with the spirit " of his century, not yet set free by Goethe," * rendered the term KaOapa-ts, which I have paraphrased as " alleviating discharge," by the equivalent " purification," and held it to indicate a conversion of passion or emotion in general into
;
1 Resting on Bemays' Zwei Abhandlungen iiber d. Aristotelische Theorie d. Drama, Berlin, 1880 (first published 1857), which cannot be too strongly recommended for its suggestiveness and lucidity.
Bemays,
I.e.
ARISTOTLE ON TRAGEDY.
65
virt uous disposition s that Goethe rightly protested on general grounds against such an interpretation, but proposed in its place one quite incompatible with Aristotle's Greek and that
;
directly challenging the authenticity of the current expression, " purification of the passions," interprets
Hegel/ while not
and restricts it in a way that makes it a vehicle for the most pregnant meaning that could possibly be ascribed to. Aristotle. The definite explanation of the term icaSajoorty,' wffich Aristotle had given in the Poetics, has not been preserved. The rendering here adopted is chiefly though not solely founded on a passage in the Politics^ treating of certain effects of music, from which it appears that "purification" (or rather "purgation ") does not fall within the educational province, and that it is a special term indicating an action upon persons predisposed to pity and terror (which all are in some degree) analogous to that by which orgiastic strains produce first excitement and then restoration to tranquillity in persons of ecstatic temperament. It is by a similar operation of music (theatrical music is explicitly mentioned) that all persons, in so far as they are predisposed to pity and fear, may be brought to undergo " a kind of purgaThe analogy is tion and relief accompanied by pleasure." medical, and indicates a relief from the passions rather than a, purification of them. It may be added to this necessarily slight account of our* materials for estimating the aim of tragedy as conceived by Aristotle, that he regarded the laws of the beautiful as necessarily applicable to the tragic treatment of action ' that the psychological connection of pity and fear as laid down in the Rhetoric suggests to us the conception of an idealised terror, acting through human sympathy, as the essence of the tragic emotion referred to that its aim, or at least an element in its aim, was pleasure, not however all pleasure, but the pleasure* arising from pity and fear by means of artistic presentation (lit. by means of imitation), but that the "purgative" function of good music and, we may presume, of good poetry though plainly separate from education or edification on the one hand, does also appear to be distinguished on the other hand from the sheer entertainment or recreation (avantawii) to be provided by inferior music for the more vulgar kind of audience.*
it
/ ;
Pol., /Esth., 3, 531. * Poetic, 14, 3.
1340
^
a,
1342
a.
* Poetic, 7, 4.
Politics, 1341.
66
In contrasting Plato and Aristotle with refer j8. gnce to their estimates of the secondary effects o: tragedy, we are apt to forget how closely they agree witlr The spectato) regard to its primary psychical operation. at a play ^ indulges his emotions, chiefly those of pity, oi fear, without the restraints of practical life, and finds a pleasure in such indulgence, and this pleasure, Plato at leasl maintains, the tragedian is ready to purchase at any price, The shrinking from no source of emotional excitement. difference begins after this point. Plato thinks only how Aristotle emotion is intensified by habit and contagion applies another principle, not wholly alien to Plato, but in this context a practically new departure. The principle is in general, that emotion may be relieved, discharged or mitigated by mere indulgence. This is not the same as to say with both Plato and Aristotle in their educational theory that emotion may be disciplined by being excited under moralising influences. But whether Aristotle meant the full opposite of this conception, that is, to accept as the basis of art the fact of psychical excitement pure and simple, without considering the relation to life of the content active in the excitement, is the question which we now have to approach. The problem is complementary to that of Aristotle's psychological explanation of enjoyment in the portrayal of the unpleasant. There the question was, " Does he refer to the pleasure of bare recognition, or to the satisfaction of profound appreciation?" Here the question is, "Does he refer to the pleasure of any thrilling emotion ending in an agreeable languor, or to the delight of pregnant conflicts of feeling issuing in a calm which is reasonable as well as pathological ? Does he, in short, take account of ideal content as well as of psychical sensibility ? " It is the same question in another form when we ask whether for him as for Plato the pleasure which is the aim of tragedy is pleasure at any price. It appears to me that we have here a case of the heterogeneous definition which we saw ^ to be so tempting and so fallacious. It is clear that the pleasurable thrill of the commonest passion anger,* for example was a fact observed
Estimate of bis
ueaningr.
'
Rep., X. 606.
cf.
Fheedrus, 268.
Rhetoric,
Chap.
i.
1370
b, 10.
ARISTOTLE ON TRAGEDY.
67
by
is
Aristotle, and influencing clear that the pathological
him in his aesthetic theory. It phenomena which furnished the
analogy for his conception of alleviating discharge are akin as well to the narcotic languor which succeeds the morbid excitement aroused by a thoroughly vicious play or novel, as to the tranquillity of assuaged emotion which is brought about by reading the Antigone or the CEdipus at Colonus. But it is no less clear that he did not mean to identify the vulgar or morbid affections with the operation of tragic art. The object of tragedy is pleasure, but only the pleasure of tragedy, and the pleasure of tragedy is a form of enjoyment strictly limited by the conditions which were explained in its
definition.
Now
if
we
ask,
how
this limitation, this picking
and choosing within given reality, can be justified, we shall find no real answer short of the complete liberation of art, not
only from the standard of common reality, but from the " kindred aim of thrilling the common sensibility. " Idealisation would be then a simple consequence of the demand for the most pregnant expression, and the mere discharge of feeling would be recognised as an extreme no more proper to art than the opposite extreme of moral purification. Aristotle, not being prepared to break away in principle from the presentation of common reality, could not reconcile these aims, all They are therefore simply of which he saw to be essential. thrown together to limit each other as best they may. Pleasure and emotion are necessary, but not at the expense of nobleness is necessary, but not at the expense nobleness of the power to stimulate emotion. The emphasis which he rightly laid on utterance and intelligence did not lead him to the idea that the delight of these factors of art was no mere psychical accident, but was the manifestation of joy in self-expression, the ultimate root and ground of aesthetic pleasure ; and therefore when we are asked whether Aristotle recognised aesthetic as apart from real interest (either moral or hedonistic) we are thrown into per;
plexity.
Emotional utterance,
rational content,
a free deal-'
ing with reality, all these he recognises as elements of art. But instead of combining them as " the emotional utterance of rational content in forms freely drawn from reality," he in" the clines to separate them ae " the pleasure of utterance," " the moral emendation of formal beauty of ideal content," reality," so that perhaps we ought to reply that he recognises
6g
all
HtSTURY OF /KSTHETIC.
that he tends to the elements of aesthetic interest, but common their origin speak of them in terms that indicate in artistic enjoyment. reality rather than their transfiguration of expression But at any rate the stress laid on the enjoyment in contents and emotions which and self-utterance, although incompatib e with as such are painful, is a step substantially to given reality, and has Kinship the relation of allegiance action as the diswith the modern idea of sport or simulated superfluous vitality, as well as with the conception charge of of expression for expression's sake. have seen that with Aristotle the stan7 Concrete criticiam. jard of commonplace reality began to yield before art in the observed necessities of idealisation, and that fine centre in emotional its highest form was pronounced by him to are now to ask, in terms of our third self-utterance. down antithesis, how far in detail his critical insight broke of Greek aesthetic, and took the the formal abstractness shape of analytic inquiry into concrete expressiveness and
We
We
characterisation.
Aristotle even loses, as compared with Plato, i. something of that kind of concreteness which arises of Drama, from a various object matter. He left, it would appear, no aesthetic recognition of architecture and the minor crafts, while even sculpture and painting, though referred to in the discussion of particular problems, are held to be on a lower It is only level of expressive capacity than music and poetry. and of his retention of the comin virtue of such references,
^mSn's
mon name "mimetic"
that we are his treatment of music and entitled poetry to anything like a general aesthetic theory. But yet the first attempt to analyse the structure and evolution of a form of art, and to deduce its origin from fundamenfor fine art in general,
to draw conclusions from
tal
reflection,
human nature, marks an epoch in aesthetic which has always been most vital when most historical. For history cannot but involve some recognition that what men do expresses what they are, and the most elementary analysis of structure pioneers a way by which reflection can
tendencies in
gain access to its object. That "imitation"^ or representation is an innate tendency that from the first it has taken in poetry two coin man
;
1 Poetic, 4.
PARTS OF A TRAGEDY.
69
ordinate forms, so that the Iliad or Odyssey is a forerunner of tragedy just as the Margites of comedy that both species
;
of drama developed through many changes out of performances in which poet and actor were one, but that comedy was later than tragedy in arriving at completion, and that the iambic metre was adopted in the course of this development from the very nature of the case, being nearest of all metres to common speech this, with the well-known details as to the number of the actors, and with the opinion that tragedy had at length reached a final because adequate form, is the substance of Aristotle's brief history of the drama. Nature, he says, was its cause, through the mimetic impulse and the diverging tendencies of man's disposition, towards the noble and the ignoble respectively, have been its guides. Even from this imperfect summary the reader will feel that
;
'
grasped the unity of human nature

manifestations.
the great naturalist breathes vitality into his subject, and has in its most splendid self-
The importance of the function which he assigned to artistic imagination, though he acknowledged no such faculty by name, may be illustrated by the technical terms employed by him in the analysis of tragedy. It is not necessary to suppose that they were all originated by himself. Omitting the quantitative division of tragedy into Prologue, Parodos, etc., although even these show the sense of a necessary order in the work of art, we should notice the six ^ qualitative elements, three forming the object represented, viz. fable or plot, character or moral temperament, intellectual reflection two constituting the means of representation, viz. linguistic expression and music and one being the mode of representation, viz. the mise-en-scene, including to a Greek the masks of the performers. Not all of these elements need special remark. The " Fable," or " Composition of the incidents," is the life of the play, and the great test of the poet.* All the above-mentioned postulates of unity refer to it. It may be "simple" or " complex," and in every case contains a transition from happiness to misfortune, or the reverse, and, if "complex," will contain, as the instruments of this transition, " surprising reversals" or "recognitions." The fable will also contain
; ;
1 Poet., 6, 7.
3 cf.
PAesdo, 61
qp.
Bemays,
p. 186,
70
the " Pathos," which is " a disastrous or painful incident," The external reference of " pathos " as here first mentioned
is
worth noticing.
the fable and its parts is further analysed with a view to securing its conformity to the conThe nature and content assigned ditions of tragic emotion. Aristotle's theory has already been disto such emotion in Human life was to be the interest but what human cussed.
The
construction
of
life
we
find
a more
difficult question.
Every tragedy, finally, may be divided into a " knot " or entanglement (which might also be called the plot, if that term is not appropriated to the "fable" or argument), and a cUno'&ment or solution. It will at once be seen how many ideal requirements are imposed by this analysis on the art which " imitates " reality how it is directed to the task of concentrating the confused panorama of life into a single, coherent, striking, and natural It is worth observing, as a touch of distinctness in picture. advance of Plato, that the mise-en-scene is dismissed as not belonging to the poet's art, though fascinating in itself. It is further worth pointing out that Aristotle is disposed, in several ways to defend poetic licence against a too literal criticism, observing that interpretation must recognise a certain play of language,^ that what is an error judged by a special science is not, unless wanton, necessarily an error judged by poetic purpose, and that an action in a play must be criticised according to fitness as well as according to merit.
Mot and Character-drawiuer-
ii-
have reserved
for discussion
by
itself
very important relation between two of the six " elements " of tragedy. What place does character-drawing,, or characterisation, hold with reference to plot I start, as in other cases, with the rough and ready notion of Aristotle's meaning, which we obtain by simply accepting
.''
current renderings as literal. In the present case I may state it by a quotation from Mr. Mahaffy "Of these various elements [the six above-mentioned], Aristotle justly considers the plot as by far the most impor-. tant, observing that recent tragedians had succeeded, by paying' attention to this point, without any character-drawing " [etho^. The term "ethos," which I have rendered above
"^
* Poei.^
25.
History of Greek Literature, vol.
ii.
p. 409.
PLOT AND CHARACTER.
71
by
"moral temperament," is here translated "character" in the sense apparently in which character is understood to-day to be the object of artistic portraiture in Shakespeare or
Thackeray. The view thus ascribed to Aristotle is in startling antagonism with our ideas. Pure plot-interest without character is for us on a level with the interest of a puzzle and its answer, and therefore in art, with the interest of a story whose characters
are
mere ciphers manoeuvred through strange and
intricate combinations. True, we demand a well-constructed plot but we think lio art worthy of the name in which the
;
action fails to issue necessarily from human character. Yet Aristotle's language sounds strong in the opposite sense. I
reproduce the whole passage on which our judgment must mainly depend, retaining the actual word "ethos" in place of any rendering. I believe that I am right in saying that
the normal application of ethos in Plato and Aristotle is to types of character as described by a single term with a moral connotation, such as " courage," " temperance," " gentleness," and their opposites. After enumerating the six qualitative elements of tragedy, Aristotle continues " The most important of these elements is the composition
:
of the incidents [the plot or fable]. For tragedy is a representation [imitation] not of men and women, but of action and life. good and ill fortune attend upon action, and man's purpose is always some kind of activity, not a quality but what ethos determines are the qualities of persons, while action makes them happy or unfortunate. And so poets do not represent persons acting in order to display their ethos, but they take it in as an accessory to action. Thus the incidents and the fable are the purpose of tragedy and in everything the purpose is the most important. Moreover there cannot be a tragedy without action, but there can be without ethos most of the later tragedies are without it, and among poets in general it is rare. For they are like Zeuxis compared with Polygnotus among painters Polygnotus is a good painter of ethos, while the art of Zeuxis indicates nothing of the kind. [Could Aristotle mean that Zeuxis was unable to paint characteristic likenesses ?] Again, if you string together speeches
Now
Poet., 6.
72
that have ethos,^ and are excellent in expression and reflections, yet you will not attain the aim of tragedy nearly so well as with a play inferior in these respects, but having a fable (or It is just as in painting plot) and composition of incidents. to put on the most beautiful colours at random would not produce as much pleasure as to draw a portrait in chalk. Nay, more the most fascinating elements of tragedy, the surprises and recognitions, belong to the fable. And it is a further proof
;
of our view, that beginners in poetry attain completeness in expression and ethe [plural of ethos], before they are capable of composing the march of incidents almost all the earliest So the fable is the mainspring poets are instances of this. life of the tragedy, and the ethe are and, so to say, the secondary; for the tragedy is a representation of an action and With this should of agents only for the sake of the action." be compared the passage translated in chapter iii.* It will be observed that if the term ethos here corresponds to character or character-drawing in the modern sense, it results that in the comparison with painting characterisation is contrasted with portraiture and assimilated to non-pictorial colour effect; which latter, however, must rather be an extreme simile to show how far removed this ethos is from what we call character. For according to the Problemata mere colour as such has no expressive capacity, not even for mood or temper priesume for individual I (ethos), much less, therefore,
;
character.
" Further, " ethos " determines " of what sort ' a person is and this " sort " means primarily whether he is good 6ip"^bad.*
;
Speeches which have no ethos are such as display no relation positive or negative to a purpose * it is the kind of purpose, i.e. primarily, whether it is good or bad, that marks the ethos of the speaker. Again, the idea of stringing together " ethical speeches is clearly I think a reminiscence of Plato's distinction between emotional harangues, which are beginners' work, and composition, which is the test of the master. The fact that "intellectual reflections" are an element distinct from
;
testifies to the same thing, for in every true characterportrait the vein of intellect is included. Therefore it appears to me that ethos in Aristotle's aesthetic
ethos
Cf. Fhcedrus, 268.
p. 20,
iii.
sup.
ib.
Foet,
ib.
Quot. above, chap.
p. 20.
Foet,
Fhadrus, 268.
ARISTOTLE S REAL VIEW.
73
meant not individual
character, the concrete living creation at
once mysterious and intelligible, that we look for in modern art, but something more typical and generic, not without a moral reference, as we say " good " or " bad " character. And so if we look at what is demanded of ethos in tragedy,^ we find four requirements first, it must be good then appropriate to the person then natural then even or consistent and if the person is to be of inconsistent temper, then consistently inconsistent. No doubt these latter requirements show some awakening to the importance of characterisation but it The is to be noted that they are all secondary to goodness. possibility that this demand for goodness may be a confused attempt to require that tolerableness or beauty which splendid characterisation can bestow on the worst character, does not entitle us to interpret Aristotle's postulate in a way which he
:
nowhere suggests.
Tiius it occurs to us that the antithesis which seems indicated by a literal rendering of Aristotle, may not be that which He may not have been contrasting the plot, he liad in mind. as a mere puzzle and solution, with the portrayal of individual human character, but he may rather have intended to oppose the man as revealed in action, or in speech which contributes to advance the march of incident, to monologue or conversation simply intended to emphasize this or that type of disThe illustration from painting position in the interlocutors. The plot seems to be compared to confirms this suggestion. a portrait, not indeed of persons as such, but, we must suppose, of action and life that is, we may venture to suggest, of persons in action according to the necessities of their chamere plot-puzzle is not a portrait of life. And yet racter. the stress laid by Aristotle upon the incidents of good and ill fortune ought perhaps to make us feel that the child-like interest in the mere event, the triumph or failure of a human being, not because he has great character, but because our attention is drawn to him, may have been more natural to the
;
Greek than
If,
to us.
.;,.
the suggeistif^h which has forced itself upon us, we should find that instead of the most infantile of all views of the drama we were attributing to should no longer imagine Aristotle the most profound.
however,
we were
to press
home
We
1 Poetic, 15.
74
that Aristotle rated ingenious plot-construction first (for apart from character it could not be more than ingenious), and held
the revelation of the mind and heart to be secondary and superfluous we should understand him^tobe contrasting the revelation of human lives in their necessary movement and collision, produced by character in action, with moralising argument or with the mere display of sentiment. The tragedians after Euripides are to us mere names and whether Euripides himself, who died before Sophocles, was to Aristotle an instance of ancient or modern style, is hard to conjecture. I do not think it possible to elucidate the problem before us by reference to literary history. It could hardly be suggested that the tendency to characterisation diminished in the later tragedians, although some among the creations of ^schylus have in this respect never been surpassed. But it may well have been the case that such a play as the
;
Prometheus Bound, depending for its attraction wholly on a picture of superhuman courage and endurance, and hardly possessing any element of a plot, did not seem to the aesthetic philosopher to be in the strictest sense a drama. I suggest this as an example of a play that has ethos, and has not dramatic composition. It has been doubted whether our great modern dramatic analyst has displayed genuine capacity to construct a play that will march. If this doubt is justified, Browning may be cited as an illustration of the antithesis between stringing together monologues that display the good and bad in character, and composing a dramatic action. I believe, however, that neither of the conceptions which I have thus contrasted would express Aristotle's exact position, which lies somewhere between them. He must, we are driven to conclude, have accepted that element of character which is
the moving spring of plot as a part of the human situation and conditions to be portrayed. But his failing to insist upon this element in its subjective aspect shows that his point of view was still on the whole Hellenic, and was more simple and more external than that which takes the humanmind to be the essence And we still are at one with him in holding the in all drama. mere exhibition of temperament in its moral aspects, when not genuinely elicited by the necessities of the story, to be dramatically superfluous. Thus we cannot allege that Aristotle explicitly breaks the fetters of Greek ccsthetic, by throwing his interest into the free
ARISTOTLE S ADVANCE.
75
representation of spiritual powers as embodied in great characters and their collision. His chief care is for organic unity and dramatic composition. Only as he presses this unity into detail after detail, it becomes more and more concrete and pregnant and we almost incline to believe that in substance, though certainly not in form, he identifies the object of artistic representation not with the common shows of life, but with
;
deepest reality. maintained that throughout his aesthetic discussion Aristotle is covertly criticising Plato.^ This is a needlessly disagreeable way of observing that the later writer's mind is wholly permeated with ideas drawn from the earlier. It is by no single origination that the advance was made which I have endeavoured to depict. It consisted, first, in Aristotle's unhesitating recognition of a supreme value in the whole sphere of beauty an attitude natural to the successor who inherits at one blow the conceptions which their author elaborated gradually and without
spiritual forces in their
It
has
been
and secondly, in the definite ascription of important functions and properties to representative art all along the boundary-line where it faces commonThus throughout the three antitheses by which place reality. I have attempted to gauge the flowing tide of Greek aesthetic speculation, the reality of common experience shows in Arisfor, metaphytotle a tendency to lose its controlling position
realising their entire significance
;
sically,
art,
is
degree,
and we must suppose all formal beauty in its credited with the power to represent what is unseen,
truth
;
and the deeper

;
ethically, the interest of
beauty
is
at
least not wholly identified either with moral or again with sensuous aims and aesthetically there is revealed in the beautiful, under pressure of an appreciative analysis, an ideal unity of structure such as to display the events of life in their essen-
connection, which is in some degree acknowledged to its roots in human character. But, on the other hand, not only does Aristotle retain the technical term " imitative," as the differentia of the art that realises beauty, qualifying it by no scientific expression that recognises the idealisation which in practice he admits, but, what is more important, he has no distinct answer to the questial
have
tion
what
principle prescribes the direction

1
which
this idealisa-
Schasler,
i.
149-153.
76
tion
is
to take.
To say " the direction of beauty " is tau" the direction of symmetry and unity" is tology to say to say " the direction of dangerously formal and empty " is simply false. All these directions are hinted at morality
; ;
by him, and no deeper theory is suggestedf Therefore we cannot pronounce that he abandoned the essential limitations
of Hellenic theory concerning the beautiful.
" the cause of this again (p. 58). The rendering in the text is erroneous ; it should run . The second cause of poetry is not the love of learning but the that not only " observations on the instinct for rhythm, mentioned by Aristotle in a later paragraph. .significance of this love of learning must now be held to refer to the deeper meaning virhich Aristotle sees in man's enjoyment of imitations. * (P' 59)- On this paragraph cf. Butcher, Aristotle^ s Theory of Art, 149-50. f (p. 61). reader might be puzzled by this discussion compared with Butcher, op. cit., The discrepancy is only verbal. p. 124, where symbolism is sharply denied to Aristotle. Professor Butcher is speaking in Aristotle's language, while I am following modern usage. Butcher in fart explains on pp. 128-9, "^ almost exactly And the two, as Professor opposed ; see p. 60 of this work. For Aristotle, the symbol is less than a " likeness " ; for
a
is,
My
the
modern
(p. 61).
it is
more.
this point. ward this
wrong on that, as is pretty certain. Professor Butcher is right and I Aristotle's Theory of Art, p. 152 : " The artist in his mimic world carries for' the better ') " to a more perfect commovement (of organic nature toward,
I
hope
am
pletion." e (p. 62). See chap.
iii.
notes c
cit.,
and d
330
(p. 42).
ff. with the rcff. to Mr. R. P. Hardie's article in Mind, say that Professor Butcher and Mr. Hardie endorse my conclusion on the whole matter of plot in relation to character, though both of them are term was perhaps against me on the point of regarding ?Sos as " typical and generic." But, following Mr. Hardie's view that ijBos has to mean expression of charncter ill chosen. in speech, as well as character, I do still think that Aristotle lays a double requirement on I il6oi, and not merely the natural one that it shall be human and correlative to irpafis. think he wants it to be emphasized as "good." All naive criticism does this, and Aristotle oscillates mainly between the poles of good and bad. fiSos to him It does is partly naive. not equally accent the whole capacity of human nature. See note rf above and Butcher's chapter on " Imitation as an Esthetic Term." (p. 76). The question is what sort of idealization or expression of the universal is suggested by Aristotle's theory. I adhere on the whole to the view of the text, while admitting that Aristotle starts along a road where it is difficult precisely to measure his advance.
(p. 74). See Butcher, op. vol. IV. no. 15. I think I
may
My
CHAPTER
V.
ALEXANDRIAN AND GRECO-ROMAN CULTURE TO THE REIGN OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.

In the hundred and fifty years that ended with jhe death of Aristotle there had lived and worked in the city of Athens, containing a population about equal to that of Glasgow, three of the greatest philosophers, four of the greatest poets, and more than one of the greatest formative artists, that the world has ever seen. If we further represent to ourselves the speculative, poetic, and plastic activity of Hellas in general throughout or before the same period, taking as a background to the whole picture the Iliad and Odyssey, which imply at least two poets of the very highest rank, we shall be in some degree prepared to estimate the change that came over the civilized world during the fourth century before Christ. It is only the simple truth if we say that no speculative thinker of at all the same calibre as Aristotle existed again before the time of Descartes, no formative artist singly ^ on a level with Praxiteles before the time of Giotto, no poet having the strictly poetic greatness of the Athenian dramatists before the time of Dante. And if we were resolved to take account of nothing but the supreme moments of the aesthetic consciousness, and the clearest crystallizations of the thought that reflects upon it, we should at this point be forced to the salto mortale of i,6oo years to But such a procedure Dante, or 2,000 to Burke or Lessing. could only be justified if it were the fact, or if it were conceivable that after this immense interval, which would then be inexplicable, the thread of reflection and production had been taken up again from the point at which it was dropped. Now the fact is, on the contrary, that in this interval the aesthetic consciousness had traversed an enormous distance
Character of the Period,
1
The emphasis
to be laid
below on mediaeval architecture

77
will explain this
reservation.
78
from
its Hellenic origin, partly as latent in the general movement of mind and history, but partly also in its own shape as art and literature and critical or speculative reflection upon
beauty.
must therefore attempt in this and the following chapter to set up landmarks, however few and distant from each other, by which the appreciation of the beautiful may be followed through the complex movement which carried the old world forward into the new. For six centuries at least after the death of Alexander the civilization which had its roots in Hellas was the civilization of the world. If we ask at what date it ceased to be so, a definite reply cannot be given. New principles emerge in history and obtain supremacy, gradually, and not at one blow. Before Justinian closed the schools of Athens in 529 a.d., the art of the new world had been growing for at least two hundred years, and had already attained its first climax in the Church of the Heavenly Wisdom at Constantinople. Nor did Proclus in the fifth century carry the philosophic tradition of a. thousand years far beyond the point to which Plotinus had brought it in the third. I shall therefore limit myself in the present chapter to the period between the death of Alexander in 323 b.c. and the inauguration of Constantinople as the seat of government for the Roman empire in 330 a,d. It has been well observed that the earliest known building which displays the principle of modern architecture undisguised by traditional Hellenic forms the palace of Diocletian at Spalato was erected^ within a few years of the latter all-important change. And the historian of philosophy may add, that Plotinus, who died in the latter half of the third century a.d., had, as the last great Hellenic thinker, broken the bonds of ancient theory concerning the beautiful, while the later writer Augustine, at the close of the fourth, was to announce the distinctively modern principle of a certainty implied in intellectual doubt.* And although the Greek poetry of the Anthology revealed a last after-prime of classical genius in the reign of Justinian, and
We
i In 313 A.D. See William Morris, Lecture on the History of PatternDesigning, in a volume of lectures by himself, Mr. Poynter and others. Published by Macmillan, 1882. * Augustine, de Trinitate, x. 14, See Rigg, Pico d. Mirandola, Introd.
THE "DECADENCE.
lived, or at least existed until the
79
dawn of the Renaissance, yet the true prime of this minor poetic art had passed away with Meleager before the Christian era. are accustomed to regard the Alexandrian and GrecoRoman ages as a time of decadence in culture. They form about one-half of that mysterious transition during which the whole of Europe produced no work of individual genius that could compare with those which had been common things throughout the creative period in Athens and in Ionia. Our judgment to this effect has acquired peculiar associations from the portrayal of a world lying in wickedness and impotent for intellectual or moral good, which Christian advocates have But in the first place, impressed upon the popular mind. view of history must assume that those who take a natural every apparent decadence has operative within it the causes which lead to the subsequent advance in so far as that advance is not due to nations outside the range of the deAnd in the second place, as soon as we consider cadence. with impartial attention the phenomena of Alexandrian and Greco- Roman art and letters, we see that we have before us a movement of extraordinary width and variety, which at every turn reveals new elements of feeling and a new spirit
We
akin to modern humanism. To define the tendencies of this period, in contrast, for instance, with those of the Periclean age of Athens, is a task which strongly impresses us with the defects of abstract had a foretaste of the same difficulty in language. attempting to explain what Aristotle meant by ethos in poetic art as indicating a quality in which the more recent
We
The antithesis between Ethos and writers were deficient. currently read into these observations of Pathos, which is But assuming Aristotle, is hardly justified by his language. what is implied in his expressions, it that it fairly represents The portrayal of " charstill remains very hard to interpret. one sense more to ^schylus than to acter" belongs in
sense to Menander more than to "Pathos" is equivalent to "a sensation" ^schylus; and much in the modern literary meaning of the term, and it is than to what we call pathos it is hard to nearer to this imagine that the later drama had more of it than the Aga-
Menander,
in
another
if
memnon or the CEdipus And thus again if we
King.
try to lay
down
that culture
the
8o
HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC,
period now before us is rather " subjective," and in the earlier time of a more " objective " cast, we are met by the apparent contradiction that in the later time philosophy becomes in great part less speculative and more inclined to physical conceptions, poetry is more devoted to natural beauty and to the presentation of daily life, formative art takes among other directions that of landscape, of portraiture, of anatomical study, while literary criticism develops a sense of history and an elaborate discrimination of individual styles. Or if we attempt to apply the antithesis of social and individual interest, and to treat the peculiarities of the later period as depending upon the self-concentration of the individual's powers in his own life instead of their devotion to a community, we are again face to face with the paradox that in the world of art and letters we meet with no such commanding individualities in the later age as in the earlier, while we everywhere find evidences in it of a growing sensitiveness, unknown before, to the idea of humanity as a whole. Thus it might seem that the application of the above antitheses might just as well be reversed. Is it possible, then, at all to describe in general language that distinction between the two periods which we can very readily feel ? The fact is that we are here dealing on a small scale with the contrast between the antique and the modern spirit. And the reason why no simple antithesis appears to meet the case is that whereas the antique spirit is single, the modern is divided. Tested, therefore, by the extreme of any abstract tendency, the modern spirit overpasses the antique only the completeness and thoroughness, whether intellectual and imaginative or political and social, that marks the highest perfection of genius as of life, is for this very reason difficult of attainment in a "modern" period, and was not in fact attained during the six centuries of transition which we are now preparing to consider. Thus we can understand how the culture of the " decadence " was at once more " objective" and more "subjective," more individualistic yet more alive to humanity as a whole, more ascetic and yet more romantic, than that of the preceding age. It will be worth while to adduce in a brief summary the principal aspects of this many-sided movement, rather in order to recall to the reader what he already knows, with a view to a certain interpretation, than with the idea of ade;
NEW
TENDENCIES.
Si
quately describing a huge complex of phenomena which the meanest of text-books would not attempt to deal with in the space at my command. will speak first of the tone and temper of life evinced by the philosophies of the time, which must be treated for this purpose as mere data in moral and intellectual history, and of the actual sense of beauty revealed in the art and letters of the so-called decadence. And, secondly, we will bring down the history of aesthetic criticism and speculation, if our fragmentary treatment of this period deserves the name of history, to the close of original Greek speculation in Plotinus. I- The extreme tendencies which have been cseneraipuioBophyaad Art. alluded to sometimes displayed themselves as extremes will meet within a single group of productions or of opinions but as a rule were dispersed among different schools of thought or different modes of art. "'' would be unfair to say of Plato and ArisPMiosophy. totle, and notoriously untrue to say of Socrates, that their philosophy was not essentially concerned with practice. Yet even for Socrates, and still more for his great successors, practice was bound up with social devotion, with civic solidarity, and with a positive faith in reason. But when Hellenic city-politics had lost their importance, and the organic philosophy of Hellas had broken up like the empire of Alexander, a new temper supervened in which, it may be observed in passing, some clues of thought were picked up again which had been thrust aside for the moment by the centralized^ speculation of Imperial Athens. The Heraclitean and the Cynic found a new development in the Stoic, the Atomist and the Cyrenaic in the follower of Epicurus, the Eleatic, and the Megarian, and in some degree Socrates himself, in the negative speculation and practical interest of the earlier Scepticism. In the new political conditions all correspondence between the outer and the inner reason, between social organization and the social will, was for the time destroyed. And thus the individual man was thrown back upon himself upon his private needs and interests on the one hand, and, on the
We
* Cf. Mr. Mackail's remarks, Greek Anthology, p. 289, on the interruption of epigrammatic production during the bloom of Periclean Athens. See below, p. 86.
82
Other hand, upon his non-political relations with friends or with humanity. The new recognition of these latter forms of fraternity is a typical example of the modern breadth and audacity with which sentiments and ideas were now pushed to their extremes. But such general sentiments of community were not then, and probably never can be, enough to absorb and direct a life's energies. Therefore the problem of practice emerged in a new perspective and proportion. The question is no longer " What great end can be attained in a world which corresponds to the needs of the rational will.?" but, " How can the individual live decently and not unhappily in a world which is indifferent and may be hostile.''" In moments of despair Plato ^ himself anticipates this inquiry, the theoretical relations of which are at once evident when we observe that the founders of Scepticism, of Stoicism, and of Epicureanism were all living at the same time towards the close of the fourth century before Christ, and that in popularity and influence, the two latter distinctively ethical schools completely dwarfed the critical and positivist successors of Plato and Aristotle, and assumed the magnitude and importance of religious persuasions not co-extensive with any political or tribal group the first considerable phenomena of the kind known to the Western world. By the side of this new personal ethic, which the Stoic based on the feeling of reasonableness, and the Epicurean on reasonableness of feeling, there was both in these and other schools a positive and naturalistic tendency of reflection. Theophrastus in the chair of Aristotle treated largely of plants and metals and, also, following a descriptive tendency already apparent in the Nicomachean Ethics, wrote on morals in such a way that his account of " character " waE extracted and preserved for its own sake. Strato, again, th< successor of Theophrastus, substituted the conception of i blind nature for that of God, and he all but anticipated * th( " Je n'avais pas besoin de cett( famous^ phrase of Laplace
hypothese-la."
The same
1
is
true of Epicurus,
and notably of
his grea
E.g. Repvilic, 426.
* Cic.
Acad.
pr. ii 38.
Negat(Slrato) opera
Deorum
se uti
undum. mundum.
adfabricandw
TECHNICAL TERMS.
83
follower Lucretius, Besides their persistent effort to reduce everything to matter and motion, the Epicureans seem to have made " the first attempt to write the natural history of civilisation," ^ and especially with reference to the origin of language they introduced conceptions which are of considerable interest to-day. Yet while thus helping to render the world intelligible, they rejected the notion which the Stoics accepted of an immanent plan or design and we shall have to return below to their reflection on art and beauty, which for this reason, though by no means valueless, necessarily ignored the aesthetic problem as we conceive it. physical theory traceable to Heraclitus was developed by the Stoics, as that traceable to the Atomist was by Epicurus. But once more, in the conflict of positivist and of ethical abstractions with the scepticism that was their counter-part, we meet with a growth of technical terms and distinctions that bear a modern aspect, and have in fact descended through later writers to modern times, in which they have hitherto been far more familiar than the less formal expressions of the older classical philosophy.^ This growth of technical terms is characteristic of the time, and extended, as we shall find, to
;
aesthetic science.
Thus the actual names " Sceptic," ' " Dogmatist," ' and " Empiric," begin in this period to be bandied about, as they The Stoics desire to establish a " criterion " ' of are to-day. an attempt which is an unfailing sign of logic detruth The term occurs indeed in Plato,* teriorating into formalism. passing expression which alludes not to a test or but in a touchstone of truth, but simply to the faculty or faculties, not restricted to either sense or reason, by which it is apprehended. And because of this same growing sense of division between the mind and the world, we now find germs of the Conceptualist terminology which has descended through Latin Terms which indicate a writers to our own mental science.
;
^ Prof. VfaX\a.ce's Epicureanism, ^. 11 j note. Of course there is much in Plato and Aristotle to suggest problems of this nature. * We inherit many terms of great importance from Plato and Aristotle, but those which are here referred to are a larger and later crop of peculiarly modern import.
* liKeirriKOi, Aoy/xartKos, /in-ipwcos, Kpvrqpiov.
* Rep.,
582 A.
84
complete or anticipatory seizing^ or comprehension by the mind, or again an inward thought or notion defined as a mental presentation and nothing more, take the place of the "form"" or "racial group,"* which were the first simple designations for facts understood in their order and essence, and not yet distinctly contrasted as thoughts with things.
The famous comparison
of the
mind
at birth to
a sheet of
paper prepared for writing on comes to us through the Stoics;' and the whole simile from which such current impression" are derived, although phrases as "mental originating in a carefully worded illustration employed by Aristotle,* received the rough mechanical form which it now The bears from the Stoics as interpreted by Cicero. may be closely rendered as " Impulsion Latinised terms, which brought to bear from outside," "assent," "comprehensible," " comprehension," " impressing notions in the mind," " a
judgment {declaratio, Greek ivdpyeia) as to the things which are seen " (contrasted with a visual sensation attended by no such judgment) all these modern-sounding phrases occur in a single passage in which Cicero is explaining the
plain
similar relation of Stoic theory of sense-perception.* impact between mind and objects was assumed by the Epicureans, whose technical terms in mental science were in part the same as those of the Stoics.
It
may be added
that
many
of the traditional
names
for
grammatical cases and forms of verbs descend to us froni Stoic

investigations.
And by the side of these philosophies, which might be called rationalistic as opposed to mysticism, though not as opposed to sensationalism, the Pythagorean vein of speculation maintained
itself,
and was reinforced
era by Gnosticism and
after the Christian Neo-Platonism, which almost suc-
ir/odAiji/'is,
KordXipj/K, fvvma, iwo'^fia, (âvrao-juia Stavoia?, Diog: L. in

yevos.
R. and
Pr., 4032
iSe'a, eloos,
,^
Plut. de Plac. Ph., 4, 11, R. and Pr., 339. Xapriov evepyov sis aTroypa^rpi. " tabula rasa " represents this expression, then the If, as I suppose, the phrase qualification " rasa " does not lay stress so much on the blankness of the a nuance which paper, as on its state of preparedness to receive impressions has some speculative importance.
*
*
6
De Anima, 424
Cic.
a, 18.
i.
Acad.
Post.,
11.
R. and
Pr., 398.
PROGRESS IN DECADENCE.
85
in grasping the fundamental idea of evolution vis. that the derivative is not necessarily the inferior. If now we return to our former attempts at definition, and repeat what is certainly true in a philosophical sense, that the culture of this age is distinguished from that which preceded
;
ceeded
it
by
subjectivity
and individualism, we must understand that
are speaking of a complex modern subjectivity, and a relative modern individualism. It is a subjectivity whichin its sceptical divorce from metaphysic throws itself into materialistic science as one complement, if it falls into mystical intuitionism as another individualism which it is an separates itself from the narrow selfishness of the tribe or
;
we
city
less than from its limited self-sacrifice, and in busying with the problems of reasonable pleasure is never far from the aspirations of religious asceticism. In the necessary progress of such a culture, one feature is most remarkable and most important for our present purpose. This is the extraordinary combination of subtlety and pedantry, of a technical language extended by widening experience and an unspeculative petrifaction of the technical terms themselves, which first delights us at the advance of Ideas drawn analysis, and then jars us by its superficiality. become the catchwords from the great masters of philosophy of sectarian dogma or of rhetorical criticism but in this very loss of speculative fluidity they form a centre for the attachment of growing experience and deepening sentiment. Such an idea, for example, is the Stoics' " Nature," which had for them actually less ordered metaphysical content than for but yet as the banner of a creed and the symbol Aristotle of a juristic ideal became a rallying point for the new aspirations evoked by the extension of the civilised world. shall find this curious contrast throughout the time we are
no
itself
We
Observation, expressiveness, sentiment, and advance by the inertia of motion in an active and cultured society every writer refines somewhat upon the suggestions of his predecessors, and brings his own insight and conviction to bear upon the material laid before him. Obvious criticisms are propounded, meet their obvious so refutation, and are re-asserted less crudely than before moves that without leaps and bounds the literary worid gradually onwards; and even in the absence of that profounder criticism which belongs only to ages of organic dealing with.
even
partial theory,
86
speculation, reason slowly perfects its language, familiar with important distinctions, and encounters
becomes
life
with
a more many-sided appreciation. /8, How much was achieved in the period of * which we speak rather by the dispersive pressure of humane culture than by depth of inspiration is especially
apparent in poetic
New and Latin
comedy,
i-
art.
of Athens, whose chief representative Menander is said to have been in youth a friend of Epicurus, must have presented a very striking embodiment of the complex changes which have been indicated. Bringing it together, as for our very general purpose we fairly may, with the comedy of Plautus and Terence a century later, from which alone we substantially know its nature, we cannot but recognise in it a kinship to our modern feeling which is wanting in Aristophanes, and even, perhaps, in the great Attic tragedians. The removal of the chorus which had unquestionably been a hindrance to realistic dramatisation, and the division into
The New Comedy
Acts and Scenes ^ which formed an unobtrusive framework to the play, and greatly facilitated the comprehension of an intricate plot, agreed well with the new matter and tone of comedy as an unpretending but ingenious representation of
common
life.
In spite of the conventionality of their characters, the plays of Plautus and Terence speak to us with the same simple human voice as Tom Jones or Vanity Fair while the splendid genius of Aristophanes has left us hardly a touch of family incident or of homely pathos, except where, in a literary satire, he drops a word of regret for a good poet mourned by his friends. family drama of every-day events and such, however incomplete in its portraiture, the new comedy certainly was touched a chord which no Greek poet had sounded, except the authors of the Iliad and Odyssey before the peculiar development of Athenian genius, and Euripides as it drew to a close. The absolute distinction between comic and tragic interest begins to fade when we have in comedy a story of actual suffering seriously faced, in which the facile
reconciliations that
seem incompatible with earnestness are
Due,
it
seems to be believed, to the Latin pqets.
SIGNIFICANCE OF COMEDY.
87
not completely carried out.
^ It is not merely that the love intrigue or love romance (not always irregular), and the human nature of common men and women are subjects akin to those
of modern literature, but that in the tone and treatment we no longer feel that hardness of naive egoism with which the Greek of the Ajax or Ion, the " Knights " or the " Clouds," grasped
own advantage and repelled every interloper as an enemy, excepting when one of two or three great interests demanded the devotion which he reserved for them alone. Mere unmotived kindness has become a greater force. The
at his
loyalty of the adventurous slave to his master is not wholly selfish, and sometimes amounts to nobility. And though this is a motive known to classical tragedy hardly to Aristophanic comedyyet its central place in art belongs to a time in which the servile^ virtues were beginning to receive the recognition which Christianity finally awarded them, and in which Terence,
a Carthaginian slave, could be a leading man of letters at Rome, as Zeno, a Phoenician stranger, had founded the influential Stoic school at Athens. Thus, without any great creative impulse, the dramatic " imitation of life " in the new comedy brings into the light a fresh region of experience, and, as it happens, one of undying interest for civilized men. And in so doing art enriches itself vith a larger insight into the beauty and goodness of common things, and with more subtle capacities of imitative preseitation, thus gradually paving the way both for a wider range of beauty and for a profounder theory of artistic utterance. It was a great thing for Terence to speak the word, that to a human being nothing human can be indifferent. ii. And besides the beginning of humane comedy, ^ the generation of Epicurus witnessed the birth of pastoral poetry. Nothing could be more profoundly suggestive thanthis of the change which was coming over the world. That conscious self-assertion of individual feeling which has been called sentimental or romantic finds, expression, still simple and healthy, in the Theocritean Idyll. When poetic fancy is coloured at once by the yearning of passion, the charms of the courtry, the sense of a beauty in art and song, and the humours
^ So the Captivi, which is quite a serious drama of life. Aristotle's " No one tills any one " (in comedy) is clearly contemptuous. Cf. close of Much Ado, "Think not on him till to-morrow."
88
of a busy and splendid town, we shall not be far wrong in inferring that man is seeking nature because he already feels that he is parted from it. contrast of this kind is implied in all distinctions between the ancient and the modem spirit. Theocritus, indeed, is but at the starting-point of the long and In him eventful course which romanticism had before it. there is no sense of unattainable depths and inexpressible meanings there is merely the trace of a new sensitiveness 1 in the imagination which indicates the germ of a new longing in the heart. And so the fancy of Theocritus is not wholly remote from life, and the songs which he ascribes to his Sicilian peasants are such as they still sing. The romantic Faust did not yet exist ; but the classical Helena was beginning to have strange dreams. Within a hundred yaars after Theocritus the first true love romance of known literature was written in the Argonautica of ApoUonius Rhodius. "* "^"^ finally, beside the poetry of love, o;" art, The Anthology. and of rustic nature, we find in the Greek culttre of this period the poetry of poetry. In the Garland or Anthology ("flower-gathering") of epigrams collected by Meleagei just before the Christian era, we have not only to note the beauty of his own love verses, but to consider the significance cf the fact that such a gathering should be made at all, and prefaced with the beautiful dedicatory poem in which the verses sebcted are compared to various flowers. subtle feeling for foetic style, and more than that, something like a sense of historical continuity, are implied in this first garland of the poeti, the earliest portion of that huge Greek Anthology which dil not receive its last addition till after the Divina Commedia had been
'
written.
the classical Italian poets, Irom Juvenal, as merely the greitest writers of a decadence is a course that can only be jusffied by very carefully bearing in mind the peculiar purpose olour treatment. are less concerned with the magnitude than with the specific quality of artistic achievement and whilt no sane man will deny that Vergil and Lucretius were great pcets, yet most careful critics will admit that their strictly poettcal genius, although indispensable to their greatness, did not
Roman
Poets.
*^'
Lucretius
J^
t""^^*
to
We
1 For a necessary warning against exaggerating the love and observaticn of nature implied in pastoral poetry, see Mackail, Anthology, p. 57?
THE LATIN
constitute
its
POETS.
89
as with
central core in the
same sense
Homer
or with Sophocles. Catullus, on the other hand, though a poet through and through, may fairly be ranked as a minor poet, not merely in the quantity of his work but in the limits of his
inspiration.
But considered as great men, endowed with poetic genius and conscious of representing the very heart and system of the civilised world, Vergil and Lucretius are examples of the art of a decadence all the more startling because in their powerful hands this art itself has greatness thrust upon it. All the peculiarities which we have observed in the fading genius of Greece are here revealed in their most emphatic
form.
First among these ranks a further phase of the influence which we observed in the New Comedy, a prevailing moral earnestness and sense of duty and of humanity. Strange attributes, it will be said, by which to characterise a decadence But as we have seen the reflective sentiment of of culture morality was especially characteristic of this age, in which the individual was lonely in a crowd, and had to shape his life by And the atmosphere of serious his own common sense. purpose and goodwill which belongs to the Roman poets is a strong instance of the power which the natural progress of mankind possesses to place the lesser and later genius ethicwhile, in so far as ally in advance of the greater and earlier
!
didactic moralising or critical theology intrude into art, we have here exemplified that division of the mind against itself
which marks the comparatively modern spirit of the time under discussion. Roman "urbanity" the very word is sigand Roman moralising satire, are not the natural nificant geniality of Homer or the semi-political orthodoxy of AristoThey are, on the contrary, the product of reflection phanes. a partly theoretical idea, and are thus analogous in and of some degree to the ethical protest and sentiment of EuriBut they are more tinged, than his, with worldly pides. wisdom, and arise not only out of a prolonged education through popular philosophies, but out of a mature experience of government and toleration among many creeds and civilisa-
tions.
And in this more humane atmosphere we are not surprised to find that the beauty of domestic love and life was at last Nothing, I believe, fully revealed to poetic apprehension.
90
like
the " Torquatus, volo, parvulus,"* or the "Carmen Nuptiale"' of Catullus, since the parting of Hector from Andromache and his child was described in the Iliad. And Ovid's Heroidum Epistolai, though no very forcible works of genius, breathe an atmosphere of simple affection in which our modern sentiment at once feels
had before been written
at
home.
although only Catullus, and not Horace or Ovid, can be compared to Theocritus for freshness and reality of loveromance, yet the immensely increased range and subtlety of poetic expression in that province is a fact of the first importance for the history of art. Love, for the poet, is now in some cases a matter of sentiment rather than passion, a delicate and even playful feeling sometimes, again, a pure and elevated affection. What touch* of human interest the ySneid can claim, it gains from the romance of Dido while the variations of mood in the Lesbia poems of Catullus, with his description of Ariadne, taken together with the odes of Horace, form a gamut of emotional expression almost comparable with that of Elizabethan song. From the lament over Lesbia's sparrow a lyric which goes, I should imagine, directly to the heart of every nineteenth century reader to the praise of the lover without fear and without reproach,* whom a pure affection preserves even from bodily peril, all shades of romantic playfulness, irony, and seriousness are now commanded by poetic art. And if the playfulness of Horace appears to us, as indeed it is, a feeble thing contrasted with the passion of Sappho, yet we must not forget that there is something noble and civilised something worthy of Shakespeare in being able now and again to smile at the terrible love-god. Art, as we know from Goethe, and have since ascertained that we ought to have known from Aristotle, is the great liberator.
; ;
And
The whole
verse runs
" Torquatus, volo, parvulus Matris e gremio suse Porrigens teneras manus
Dulce rideat ad patrem

Semihiante labello."
Containing the well known passage, beginning, " tus nascitur hortis." 3 The " Integer Vitse " of Horace.
*
Ut
flos
in septis secre-
NATURE IN VERGIL.
91
extreme border of the art of passion, we find far as I know, is the first poetical study<^ of the counter-frenzy. This pardy " dramatic " lyric, for its horror and pathos, and its sense of correspondence between the moods of man and of nature, might be the work of the very boldest among romantic writers. If, after reaching this point in the growth of art, we turn back to Aristotle's explanation of the pleasure produced by representations of what is unpleasant, we shall feel that it needs much stretching to include our charmed self-abandonment to the impetuous rush of Catullus' lyric, charged with the passion and desolation of a ruined life. Once more, this sympathy between man and external nature is seen to be gaining depth and substance. It is idle to deny that the Athenian and Ionic poets have felt the spell of the outer world but in the Roman writers the increasing subtlety and detail of descriptive expression, though still immensely short of modern landscape poetry, bear witness to a refinement of conscious delight in natural beauty for its own sake which is different in principle from the reference to it,
at the
And
in the
Atys what, as
as in
Homer, by
allusive epithet or illustrative simile.
It is
most
significant that
Horace should have thought
it
necessary
to protest against descriptive insertions.^ The principle which I am endeavouring to elucidate, that so long as art is alive its range of appreciation and expression extends itself by a natural process, in which the "apperception" of later artists is prepared by the recorded perceptions of their forerunners, could not be better illustrated than by a criticism which I will venture to quote at length, from one who writes of what he well understands " Everything,^ then, in Vergil's history, shows him a genuine poet of the country, and at the same time no one who really knows his poems can deny that they fully bear out the evidence of his life. It is true that he drew very largely on other poets, and could not disengage himself from the anteFrom Homer, Hesiod, Aratus, or cedents of his art. Theocritus, for example, come nearly all the passages in his
:
works
in
which
birds
are mentioned.
But though they
1 Ars P., 16. " They describe the grove and altar of Diana, or a course through pleasant fields, or the rainbow." 3 Year with the Birds, by an Oxford Tutor, p. no.
river's
92
descend from these poets, and bear the features of their they are yet a new and living generation, not and their beauty lifeless copies modelled by a mere imitator and their truth is not that of Greek but of Italian poetry. Let any one compare the translations of Aratus by other Roman hands, by Cicero, Festus, and Germanicus, with Vergil's first Georgic, and he will not fail to mark the difference between the mere translator, and the poet who breathes into the work of his predecessors a new life and an immortal one. There is hardly to be found, in the whole of Virgil's poems, a single allusion to the habits of birds or any other animals, which is untrue to fact as we know it from Italian naturalists." I do not doubt that the passages on which Vergil thus improves had served as guides and starting points
ancestors,
;
for his
own
observation.
with the love of Nature we must compare its complement and condition the feeling of city-life. The intensification of pastoral sentiment by contrast with the busy splendour of Rome, lending an extraordinary stateliness to the verse which this combined emotion animates, is distinctly mirrored both in Virgil and in Horace. The nineteenth-century dweller in a huge city, whether London or Paris, Berlin or New York, is quite at home in this subtle sense of complementary pleasures, in which the simple charm of country life is really to some extent a foil to the recognition of supreme powers and interests " res Romanae perituraque regna " centred in the city. These two extremes therefore, the love of the country and the sympathy with town life are there nobler lines in Vergil than the "Si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis ? " unite in a new and dominating form of feeling, not possible to the world in any great degree before the Roman age. The "praises of Italy" express something more than an affection for Italian scenery. They are deeply coloured with historical sentiment, the sentiment of national duty belonging to the head of civilisation an emotion of a nature to heighten and be heightened by the appreciation of the picturesqueness in life and manners produced by the relations of Rome with all quarters of the known world. The feeling of the picturesque is essentially historical, and though I do not think that we find its advanced form, such as the
And
ALLEGORY IN ART.
93
admiration for ruined buildings, in any ancient writer,^ yet this is only an outgrowth of the relation to humanity which is
really at the root of all delight in external nature.^ In any case, the feeling of a national " mission "
by which
Vergil was clearly inspired when he wrote of Rome, adds a new dignity and significance to all the external aspects of life, and communicates a fresh acuteness to feeling, and a peculiar
majesty to expression.
But we may notice in the constellation of Roman writers one sure sign of a decadence. The minor poets are the more complete artists. Lucretius and Vergil were, it might be said, too great as men to be complete as poets in an age whose mind was on the strain, and divided against itself. Much of Lucretius is pure science. Much of Vergil, though not artificial in the most vulgar sense, as opposed to genuine or sincere, is yet dictated by practical or purely historical interest
characteristic of the age, but incompatible with the simplemindedness which belongs to art.
^""^ "^*^ writing the history of fine art. ybut Only noting some salient points at which, by Architecture, j v n î. i definite mnuences, the workmg idea of beauty was deepened and enlarged. It is needless, therefore, to say much of formative art and architecture, the tendencies of which fall for the most part within the lines of those which have just been traced in literature. But it seems necessary to mention a few definite phenomena of extreme significance. One of these phenomena is the prevalence of " allegorical treatment in the painting and sculpture of the fourth century and later. Allegory, as I understand it, is opposed both to natural symbolism, such as that by which the lines of a flowerbud indicate growth and vitality, and to a deeply rooted tradi-
Formatdw Art and
^^
an approach to the feeling in question in the famous letter of AdFam., 4, 5, and in many epigrams of the first and second centuries b.c. See Mackail, Anthology, p. 62. * The degree in which this definite historical sentiment may fairly make a difference in the charm of landscape as such is a very difficult question.
'
There
is
Sulpic. Ruf. Cic.
"Praises of Italy" (G^wr^Vii., 136 ff, asp. lines 167 if.) with the following passage from Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 163 " Those ever-springing flowers and ever-flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue ; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the foursquare keep of Granson."
Compare Vergil's
94
by which the goddess Athena was connected with ideas of courage and of wisdom. As a rule, therefore, an imaginative presentation which is named after an abstract idea has an allegorical character. Of course
tional symbolism, such as that
there are degrees of this relation. Eros, the love-god, for is primarily an imagined person with attributes fixed by tradition. No one would call him an allegory of love, because he is more than a mere sign with content limited to a definite intellectual idea. The question whether the statue of "Kairos" (Opportunity) by Lysippus was* or was not strictly allegorical turns partly on the degree in which the conception was traditional following for example, as is now alleged, the treatment of Hermes and partly on the issue of fact whether it did or did not bear a knife, merely to recall the popular Greek phrase for a critical moment, "on the razor's edge." At any rate, the Calumnia of Apelles, Lucian's description of which is embodied by Botticelli in the wellknown picture of the Uffizi, must be considered as wholly cillegorical, and it seems that allegorical figures representing such ideas as Virtue, Concord, Justice, and the like, formed a regular branch of sculpture in Greco- Roman times. Again, the ideal personification of towns, countries, and peoples, not unknown to the great time of Athenian art, takes a prominent place in the period before us. Such is the figure of "the Fortune of Antioch," by Eutychides, a pupil of Lysippus.* This further connects itself with the peculiarly Roman art of triumphal relief, in which historical interest is substituted for artistic value. And the full antithesis to abstract allegory seems to be finally supplied by the great Greco-Roman art of genre and portrait sculpture which, however, through the ideal or deified portrait, such as that of Alexander as Zeus or of Antinous, almost returns again into the allegorical region. In other directions an analogous variety displays itself. In the Rhodian school of sculpture we find a special tendency to situations of horror, cruel rather than tragic ' at the court of Attains in Pergamus the hostile contact with the Gauls re-
example,
Carriere,
ii.
396, treats
that, a, the
is
it
as an allegory.
Overbeck,
;
on the grounds
*
3
treatment was traditional
ii. 107, doubts this ^, the presence of the
alleged attributes
uncertain.
this
Overbeck, ii. 134. tendency showed by painting in
epoch, from Parrhasius
Flut. de
Aud.
downward
Poetis, 3.
ARCHITECTURE.
95
suited in a new pathetic and characteristic interest, of which the statue of a dying Gaul, known as the " dying Gladiator/'
a famous example. In Rome, again, towards the end of the Republic, the school of Pasiteles strangely combines the tendencies of refined sentimentalism, affected archaism, and anatomical observation from the living model. certain development of landscape painting, to which the mural decorations in Pompeii bear witness, does not sustain the hypothesis of a direct appreciation of the beauty of scenery, which it might naturally suggest. It is a curious observation that " on all the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum there is perhaps not one subject which can be positively identified as local." ^ This indicates that the sources of inspiration were chiefly traditional, although the capacity of these painters for naturalistic execution as, for example, in painting fruit is spoken of by modern experts in the highest terms.^ With reference to the position of architecture and the minor arts, after simply noting that such crafts as that of gem-cutting and gold and silver work, with the minute skill and subtlety which they imply, laid hold more and more on the interest of the wealthy Roman world, superseding the comparatively severe beauty of the painted earthenware vase, I may venture to indulge the reader and myself in a somewhat long quotation from an author,' who best of all men is qualified I have found myself unable to express the essence to judge. of this passage in my own words either more shortly or more suitably for my purpose. " Now this question of the transmission of the forms of Greek architecture leads us at once to thinking of that of Rome, since it was by this road that all of it went which was The consciously accepted as a gift of the classical times. subject of the origin of all that is characteristic in Roman art is obscure enough, much too obscure for my little knowledge even to attempt to see with it nay, even in speaking of it, I had better call it the art of the peoples collected under the Roman name so that I may be understood to include all the
is
influences that
went
to
its
creation.
1 2
Emyd.
Art. "Archaeology," Encycl. Brit., A. S. Murray. Brit, " Archaology " and " Mural Decoration," Prof. Middleton.
ff.
Cf. Poynter, in Lectures on Art, Macmillan, 1882. ' Morris, in Lectures on Art, Macmillan, 1882, p. 151
Wm.
96
"
Now if we are asked what impression the gathered art of these peoples made upon modern art, I see nothing for it Before but to say that it invented architecture no less. their time, indeed, temples took such and such forms among divers nations, and such and such ornament grew on them but what else was done with these styles we really do not know a frivolous pleasure-town built in a late period and situate in Italy, which destruction, so to say, has preserved for us being the only token left to show what a Greek house might perhaps have been like. For the rest, in spite of all the wonders of Greek sculpture, we must needs think that the Greeks had done little to fix the future architecture of the world there was no elasticity or power of growth about the right in its own country, used for the worship and style aspirations which first gave it birth, it could not be used for anything else. But with the architecture of the men of the Roman name it was quite different. In the first place they seized on the great invention of the arch, the most important invention to home-needing men that has been or can be made. They did not invent it themselves, of course, since it was known in ancient Egypt, and apparently not uncommon in brick-building Babylonia but they were the first who used it otherwise than as an ugly necessity, and in so using it, they settled what the architecture of civilisation must henceforward be. Nor was their architecture, stately as it was, any longer fit for nothing but a temple a holy railing for the shrine or symbol of the god it was fit for one purpose as church, house, aqueduct, market-place, or castle for another nor was it the style of one country or climate ; it would fit itself to north or south, snow-storm or sand-storm alike. Though pedants might make inflexible rules for its practice when it was dead or dying, when it was alive it did not bind itself too strictly to rule, but followed, in its constructive part at least, the law of nature ; in short, it was a new art, the great art of civilisation. " True it is that what we have been saying of it applies to it as a style of building chiefly in matters of ornament the arts of the conquered did completely take the conqueror captive, and not till the glory of Rome was waning, and its dominion became a tax-gathering machine, did it even begin to strive to shake off the fetters of Greece ; and still, through all those centuries, the Roman lords of the world thought the
ROMAN AND BYZANTINE

little
ART.
97
timber god's house a holy form, and necessary to be impressed on all stately architecture. It is a matter of course that the part of the architectural ornament of the Romans, which may be definitely called pattern-design, shared fully in
this
slavery
it
was altered and somewhat spoiled Greek
work, less refined, and less forbearing. Great swinging scrolls mostly formed of the Acanthus foliage, not very various or delicate in their growth, mingled with heavy rolling flowers, form the main part of the Roman pattern design that clove There is no mystery in them, and little interest to the arts. in their growth, though they are rich and handsome indeed, they scarcely do grow at all, they are rather stuck together for the real connected pattern, where one member grows naturally and necessarily out of another where the whole thing is alive as a real tree or flower is all this is an invention of what followed Roman art, and is unknown both Nevertheless, this to the classical and the ancient world. invention, when it came, clothed its soul in a body which was chiefly formed of the Greco- Roman ornament, so that this splendid Roman scroll-work, though not very beautiful in It is, perhaps, itself, is the parent of very beautiful things. which is a special craft of the in the noble craft of mosaic Roman name that the foreshadowing of the new art is best seen. In the remains of this art you may note the growing formation of more mysterious and more connected, as well as freer and more naturalistic design their colour, in spite often of the limitation forced on the workman by simple materials, and in short there is a sign is skilfully arrayed and beautiful in them of the coming of the wave of that great change which was to turn late Roman art, the last of the old, into Byzantine art, the first of the new. "It lingered long. For long there was still some show of that art had been so life in the sick art of the older world not easy to get rid even powerful, so systematized, that it was The first stirrings of change were felt in of its dead body. the master-art of architecture, or, once more, in the art of As I said before in speaking of the earliest buildbuilding. ing that shows this movement, the palace at Spalato, the ornamental side of the art l^ged long behind the construcIn that building you see for the first time the arch tional. acting freely, and without the sham support of the Greek beam-architecture henceforth, the five orders are but pieces
;
98
of history, until the time when they were used by the pedants of the Renaissance to enslave the world again." It has been necessary in the foregoing review of the Hellenistic and Greco- Roman decadence to lay stress on its positive achievements, from which the reflective aesthetic I am consciousness of the time had to draw its material. aware that I run the risk of being asked whether I mean to deny that there really was a decadence, whether I have forgotten the vulgar and brutal features of Greco- Roman civilisation, and whether I imagine that the intellectual darkness, extending to the great individual forms of art, which followed upon the Christian era, was a historical accident unconnected with a moral and intellectual bankruptcy in ancient life. thorough treatment of this question can only be attempted It in connection with the philosophical side of our subject.' must suffice at present to suggest that the features which indicate a decay in the civilisation of the old world are themselves one great term in the set of contrasts which I have been attempting to represent. The spirit which was ultimately destined to burst the bonds of classical tradition began by to some extent reanimating it but that in the old life which could not be inspired with new meaning naturally fell into greater and greater corruption. And it was natural that the process of forging sensuous forms adequate to a new impulse should be tedious and gradual in proportion to the greatness of that impulse, and that during a long transition the spirit should be for the most part hostile to sense or the flesh, although the continuity underneath the transition was never Through all the surface conflicts of intellect really broken. and feeling and faith, the unconscious art of architecture, in which necessity blossoms into expression, continued to develop, so that the problem of reconciliation was solved by going on, and spiritual religion had found a sensuous manifestation before it knew that it needed one. The degree in which, before the revival of letters, the tradition of the old world, whether in art or in speculation, continuously affected the new, is a
most
difficult
and interesting question.
But
it
must be
re-
membered
are only now adjusting our historical consciousness to the conception that the Christian era marked
that
1
we
For a statement of
it
see Prof. Harnack, Art. " Neo-Platonism,"
Encyd.
Snt,
PARTIAL PHILOSOPHIES.
99
no miraculous new
birth of the world, and it is probable that the continuity of progress has hitherto been under-estimated rather than the reverse. In turning to the reflective aesthetic of the Bofleotive
astneuo.
Alexandrian and Greco-Roman age, we must at once admit that we have to deal, not with complete systems
in continuous succession, but with tendencies fragmentarily indicated. Numbers of post-Aristotelian treatises on art are
lost to
us
but
it
is
also clear that true aesthetic speculation
and could not be, a matter of central interest to the predominant philosophies before Neo-Platonism. The theory of beauty can only be fertile for the thought which grasps life as a whole in half-systems such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, or Scepticism, there is no place for the belief that reality may find utterance in human feeling or fancy. And although NeoPlatonism was also a half-system, being fundamentally mystical, that is to say, having lost faith in life and science, and
not,
;
was
being compelled for that reason to yield the sceptre to Christianity, yet just as Christianity, although a concrete principle of life, constantly fell into repellent onesidedness, so Neo-Platonism, though not a concrete principle of life, was profound enough to inspire a great mind for a time with a
comprehensive faith in the reasonableness of reality. But partial philosophies are often definitely suggestive just because they make the most of the little which they acknowledge, and here Stoicism and Epicureanism are no exceptions. After saying something of these philosophies in their aesthetic aspect, it will be necessary to comment shortly upon the more literary and rhetorical criticism, before closing the present chapter with a reference to Neo-Platonic theory in the third
century a.d.
The Stoic Pantheism led Chrysippus in the 1. third century B.C. to the conception that " many animals have been produced by nature with a view to beauty, in which she takes delight, enjoying their colouring " ^ and, for example, that the peacock was produced for the sake of his
*****
;
Rash as such a suggestion must tail, because of its beauty. appear to us, who cannot find room in nature for any purpose, but only for causation, it has the merit of unmistakably :signalising the fact and problem of natural beauty, which is,
^
XaCpovaa Tg^woiKtXi^.
Plut. de Stoic. Rep., 21.
lOO
HISTORY OF ÊSTHETIC,
however
creations,
it
may have come

is
to be so, analogous
perfect,"
to
man's
and harmonious with man's emotions.

universe alone
;
says Cicero,^ quoting has in him some particle man is not, though he Chrysippus of the perfect, and he is born to contemplate and imitate the universe." The mere laxity of the language seems to bring these ideas near to us we hear sentiments that ring like them from Christian divines and from nineteenth-century art-critics. To "contemplate and imitate" might surely at least include to reproduce in plastic and poetic form and some Stoics were Poseidonius, not wholly without such a liberal conception. two centuries after Chrysippus, described poetry, almost on the lines of Aristotle, as " comprising an imitation of human
"The
"
and divine things." But this was not the ordinary Stoic meaning, and it became They took the imitation of the universe less and less so. rather in the sense familiar to us from George Herbert
:
" Entice the trusty sun,
From
Who
if that thou can, his ecliptic line, beckon the sky. lives by rule then, keeps good company."
The mechanical view of imagination, the negative or intellectualist view of emotion, the complete subordination of " theoretical " to " practical " interest characteristic of an age for which practice had become chiefly an affair of theory, all these influences hindered the Stoic from completing his view of man's place in nature by an adequate theory of aesthetic And at last, in Seneca, by a disordered reminisexpression. cence of Plato which we shall trace among the Epicureans as well, the formative arts are reckoned as mere ministers to The only true liberal art, for sense, like the art of cookery. the art which aims at virtue and poetry him, is philosophy in so far as it is capable of being made a vehicle for philosophic idea's. For speculative purposes such a conception means a complete obliteration of all fruitful distinctions. ii. The Epicurean school were opposed to the pcurean. g^^j^, belief in Providence and in a reasonable kinship between man and nature, and therefore, for the opposite reason to the Stoics, but like them in the result, they disbelieved in the objective value of art as expressing a reasonable content. " Music," writes Philodemus, a contemporary of
De Nat.
Deorum,
ii.,
14.
LUCRETIUS.
Cicero,
lOI
is " irrational and cannot affect the soul or the emotions, and is no more an expressive art [lit. imitative] than cookery." ^ This censure is aimed straight at the principal line of advance towards a profound analysis of expression which we observed in Plato and more especially in Aristotle. The aesthetic of mere feeling, resting as it does on the acceptance of simple facts as to what gives certain pleasures, joins hands with the opposite extreme, the aesthetic of pure
^ form. I cannot assent to Schasler's contemptuous treatment of the powerful lines in which Lucretius refers the harsh scream of the saw and the musical sound of a skilfully played instrument to the respective angularity and smoothness of the physical elements operative in each case, and proceeds to apply a similar explanation to colours and to smells. Of course this assertion was for him but a guess, and it may be But that in the two latter cases it will never be justified. the difference between harshness and harmony in musical sound is a difference in impact on the organ, which is at least conveniently symbolised by difference of shape' in the graphical representation of the impinging movement, and although a difference in sensuous agreeableness does not explain or coincide with every difference in artistic beauty, yet it is an essential element of aesthetic to understand the former, if only in order to show the limits of its connection with the latter. The historical hypotheses thrown out by the same poet that men learnt song from birds, and in another passage* instrumental music from the wind in the reeds are notably Yet a inferior to the aesthetic anthropology of Aristode. pervading idea of human progress and a resolute adherence to physical explanations conjoined with a large sense of natural beauty, to which as in Virgil the movement of the verse is magically responsive, confer upon Lucretius some-
thing of the splendour and mystery which belong to our

feeling for a beauty founded in necessity.
own
I quote
from
Miiller, 2,
193
oiSe
yap
/u/xjjthcov
17
/iOva-VKri
fiaWov
rpr^p
fj
fW,yapiK-q. 2 Krit. Geschichte der Aesth.,

3
i.
210.
Lucret.,
Lectures,
ii.
408.
I., p. 68 (E. Tr.). forms of wave, have an extraordinarily tone generated by the zither and violin resemble in harshness the angularity of their wave-forms."
Cf.
Helmholtz, Popular
Scientific
Series
forks, with their rounded soft quality ; and the qualities of
" Tuning
* Lucr., 5, 1378.
102
tarchus and Zoilus in the third century B.C., must just be mentioned as contributing to the formation of a historical sense, if only in the inferior form of a canon or classitself in later Roman list of great writers, which repeats It would seem indeed that Zoilus must have criticism.^ worked rather to enslave interpretation by a captiously literal
reading, than, like Aristotle, to liberate
it
AriBtaxcimsand zouus.
Hi-
The Alexandrian
literary criticism of Aris-
by an
intelligent
The habit of recognising allowance for figures of speech. a "canon" of writers, with a parallelism, usually groundless, between Greek and Roman authors, was connected with the custom of classifying styles under three categories, or tacking on a single distinctive epithet to every writer a tendency of which the more appreciative side is exemplified by the poetical introduction to Meleager's Garland of Poets. It is very curious that the distinction of the three styles was not merely applied to Homer's speakers, but ascribed to Homer as having been remarked by him ^ an idea which, in respect of the two extremes of a copious and a neat style, is really not without foundation in Antenor's remarks on the The formation of a speaking of Ulysses and Menelaus. medium beside the two extremes would readily suggest itself. All this aspect of literary and rhetorical criticism is apt to appear to us to be idle and tedious. But it helped to condition more important movements. iv. The rhetorical interest of the later Roman Later GrecoRoman otiucb, critics produced a substantially liberal appreciation of the aims of art, though it was for the most part not couched in aesthetic form. After all, oratory, like art, is a mode of self-expression ; and the comparison or confusion of poetry with oratory formative art being by a stock simile connected with poetry emphasizes the expressive purposes and organs Some of the criticism suggested by the analogy thus of art. obtained between oratory and formative art shows a high Thus Dionysius of Halidegree of historical sympathy. carnassus' in the first century B.C. writes " There are ancient pictures, simple in colouring and without variety in the mixtures of pigments, but true (uKpiêii, severe ?) in outline and
Prof.
2 Cf. Prof.
3
Journal of Philology, xviii. 230 ff. Nettleship l.c. w. quotation from Gellius. See Iliad, 3, 200. See Prof. Nettleship, l.c.
Nettleship,
H.
H.
CICERO.
103
possessing a great charm in this respect ; while the later ones are less good in outline but are more elaborately finished with varying effects of chiaroscuro, and have their strong point in the variety of mixtures." have not the pictures in question but the description seems to correspond to the wellknown difference between art in its youth and in its decay. When Aristotle said that all the work of the ancient artists was bad, let us hope that he was referring to a different period !^ But yet criticism was stereotyping itself and losing its vitality. Even in Cicero we find a tendency to brief and formal characterisation of the great painters and sculptors, though the writer is still animated by a real love for their art; in Quintilian the originality appears to be less, and the schoolbook tendency greater,'' while, to make a long story short, Fronto, in the third century, a.d., writes as if he had been taught a single epithet for each artist or poet. In Cicero however, in the work on the Sublime which passes under the name of Longinus, in Plutarch, in Dio Chrysostom, and in Philostratus there is something more that
We
calls for notice.
Cicero was an eclectic in philosophy, and we are not to expect original speculation from him. Yet he was earnest, candid, and thoroughly well read, while retaining the power of direct perception that marks a man versed in practical life. Thus, when he presupposes the Greek view of beauty as constituted by an apt relation of the parts to the whole,* we see that this view had become a commonplace of reflection when he travesties* the Platonic doctrine of abstract forms by identifying the form of beauty with a mental picture from which the artist copies, which is apparently the same for a Zeus and for an Athena, and which in "our" minds is always capable of a higher beauty than that of the greatest work of Pheidias, we understand that he takes art so seriously as to identify the artist's mental image with that supreme objective order which Plato precisely denied that the artist could ever apprehend or must not lose sight of the practical reversal represent. of Plato's position for the better which this identification involves, while condemning the outrageous abstraction by
;
We
2 3
Probkmata, 895 a 35. For this judgment I rely chiefly on
De
Officiis, i, 27.
Prof. Nettleship, I.e. Orator., cc. 2 and 3.
I04
which the mental ideal is treated as though it were an innate idea, not dependent on genius, labour, and experience.
And
we
along with this seriousness in Cicero's estimate of art
as in the Roman poets, an increasing sensitiveness to the beauty of natural scenery, combined as in Chrysippus and constantly in modern times with a sentimental form of the argument from design.^ There is perhaps a lack of distinction between beauty and use, but on the other hand there is something approaching to a feeling for the picturesque and the
find,
sublime. And the absurd reference to a single abstract and apparently innate form of beauty is more than atoned for by the really important suggestion, " Seeing that there are two kinds of beauty, one of which consists in grace, the other in dignity we must consider grace as feminine, and dignity as masculine
beauty." The subdivision of beauty (apart from so-called moral and intellectual beauty) into kinds is a step which I do not know Aristotle can to have been explicitly taken before this date. consequence of the only be said to do it inferentially, as a distinction between forms of art. It is a step incompatible with adherence to the mere formal sesthetic of Hellas, and is an essential condition of a more appreciative analysis. The work on the Sublime, bearing the name of Longinus, a man of letters of the third century A.D., and secretary to Zenobia, is now on the whole believed by the best authorities* to belong to a date soon aftei the time of Augustus. The mere existence of the word vô<i "sublimity," lit. "height," as a one of a vast technical term in sesthetic or rhetorical criticism, number of such technical terms current in the Greco- Roman The philosophical importance of the is a notable fact. age,^ treatise is rather in its evidence that consciousness has become sensitive in this direction than in any systematic insight Nevertheless the writer has into the nature of the sublime.
'^
De Natura Deorum,
in this
list
xxxviii., xxxix.
" Let us dismiss refinements of dis-
pute,
and look with our own eyes at the beauty of those things which we allege Rough rocks, caves, and mountains are to be formed by divine providence."
named
*
of beauties.
36.
De
Officiis, i,
Had
Schiller this passage before
him
in
Anmuth
u.
IViirde?
* * Prof.
See A. Lang's Introd. to Havell's Longinus. Yi.^tVX^hv^, Journal of Fkilology, xviii. 236.
THE SUBLIME.
105
" Sublimity is, so to say, the image elements of such insight. " It was not in nature's plan for us, of greatness of soul."^ her chosen children, to be base and ignoble no, she brought us into life and into the whole universe, as into some great field of contest, that we should be at once spectators and ambitious rivals of her mighty deeds, and from the first implanted in our souls an invincible yearning for all that is great, all that is diviner than ourselves. Therefore even the whole world is not wide enough for the soaring range of human thought, but man's mind often overleaps the very bounds of space. When we survey the whole circle of life, and see it abounding everywhere in what is elegant, grand and beautiful, we learn at once what is the true end of man's being. And this is why nature prompts us to admire, not the clearness and usefulness of a little stream, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and far beyond all the Ocean."* " When a writer uses any other resource, he shows himself to be a man but the Sublime lifts him near to the great spirit of the Deity."* Whereas then in statuary we look for close resemblance to humanity, in literature we require something which transcends humanity a remark bearing closely on the place* of sculpture in ancient, and poetry in modern art. On the other hand, as showing that there is not really a definite grasp of any distinctive notion of the Sublime, we may note such a description as this, " when a passage is pregnant in suggestion, when it is hard, nay impossible, to distract the attention from it, and when it takes a strong and lasting hold on the memory, then we may be sure that we have lighted on the true Sublime."
may say, perhaps, that the writer was fairly on the track of some such conception as that of the Sublime depending on an effort or reaction on the part of the mind, occasioned by some form of contest with the suggestion of magnitude or force, in which effort or reaction the subject becomes assured of a deeper spiritual strength in himself than he commonly experiences. The absence of any persistent attempt to drag out the essence of the matter by definition is exceedingly remarkable, and the writer's real strength is in his literary judgment and the selection of examples. In the discussion of style he betrays a consciousness that
We
Havell's Longinus, p. 15 (c.

lb., c.
ix.).
Havell's Longinus, cxxxv. p. 68.

6
xxxvi. p. 69.
* lb., p. 70.
/j.^ cvii. p. 12.
106
sublimity has
some connection with incompleteness, but
this
wrongly an important factor in idea, which theory of Kant, he does not pursue to any speculative the result. He is very much alive to the false sublime frigidity or bombast as proceeding mainly from over-elaboration of conceits, and is thus well aware that reserve and suggestiveforms rightly or
ness are connected with the Sublime. And it is a notable sign of the times that Hebrew poetry "And here first appears within the field of Greek aesthetic. ordinary man, having thus also the law-giver of the Jews, no formed an adequate conception of the Supreme Being, gave Laws it adequate expression in the opening words of his ? Let there be light,' and there was God said what ^ let there be land,' and there was." However philosophically incomplete, this work adds one to the distinctions which experience was revealing within the sphere of beauty, and is probably responsible for the exceedingly important part played by the theory of the Sublime in
'
'
'
'
modern
speculation.
Plutarch of Chseronea, 50-100 A.D., attacks both Stoics and Epicureans, and does not, so far as I know, profess himself an adherent of any school of philosophy. For our present purpose the most significant of his works is a discussion of the question, how, ini view of the base and immoral matter treated of by poets, young men are to read them ["hear" In spite of his them] without sustaining moral injury. moralistic attitude, the imbecility of some of his advice and interpretations, and the want of intelligence in his constant references to the arguments and poetical quotations of Plato's Republic, he has the merit of stating in plainer terms than owing to the accumulation of aesthetic experience Aristotle during the long interval between them the strictly aesthetic " Can what is really ugly become beautiful in question ?" No doubt he perpetually confuses this with the quesart " Do we commend an act morally because we admire tion " which he rightly answers in the negative, it in a work of art ? but which is not a problem of aesthetic, but only of the dis-
tinction
between
aesthetic
and
ethics.
^ Jb., c. ix. p. 18. * It was first edited in
modern Europe
in 1544,
and often
since,
notably
by Boileau in 1674.
See Lang's Introduction to Havell's Longinus.
PLUTARCH.
107
But he also raises the real problem in distinct termsthe terms of ugliness and beauty, asking in effect, " Can what is ugly in itself be beautiful in art ? If Yes, can the art-representation be suitable to and consistent with its original ? If No, how does it happen that we admire such art-representations ? " I have framed the above question out of Plutarch's " In essence the ugly cannot beanswer,' which runs thus come beautiful but the imitation is admired if it is a likeness. The picture of an ugly thing cannot be a beautiful picture if it were, it could not be suitable to or consistent with its original. Beauty, and to imitate beautifully [which cannot mean to make a beautiful picture, but only to imitate
: ; ;
. .
successfully^ are quite different things,"
And
" the reason^
why
such representations in art, both poetic and pictorial,* is because the artist's cunning has an affinity for our intelligence, as may be observed in the fondness of children for toy animals, and in such cases as that of the audience who preferred Parmeno's imitation of a squeaking pig to the real
pig-
we admire
The mere
tion
looseness of Plutarch's language in this explana-
seems to give his view a generality which places it in advance of the precisely limited analysis furnished by Aristotle, through a reference to the enjoyment of inference. But Plutarch is still essentially on the same ground as Aristotle. He, like Aristotle, is speaking of the response of our intelligence to the artist's skill, not of the affinity between the artist's intelligence and the significance of the things which he portrays. The natural sense-perception * is the same, he expressly says, with that which the artist gives us that is, the latter owes nothing of its content to the passage through a human mind. The only difference between the two is in our concomitant knowledge whether the presentation is natural or artificial. This is for him the moral of the story about Parmeno, and excludes the interpretation that the audience preferred the ventriloquist's imitation because it was exaggerated with humorous intention, which would be the natural This example is explanation from a modern point of view.
;
'^
De Audiendis
Poetis
iii.
^ Sr/tTroir. irpo)8A., v. i.
Plutarch insists on this stock comparison to show that poetry being imitative, like painting, is not wholly responsible for the nature of its subjects. * Sv/in*. irpofiX., V. I, TO avrd rrji at<rft;<r<us irdOos ov\ o/iomi SiaTidr/a-i T^v ^^?CWi o'T'"' f-V '"'po"^ Soia ToB XoyiKMS ^ tfuXoriiMq. vepaiveaOai to ytyvo/xei'ov.
*
I08
a Strange counterpart to Kant's case of the nightingale imitated by the human voice, which, he says, becomes tedious
the
moment
the deception
is
discovered.
The common
ground must be that we expect more from a man than from an animal, only in the one case we think we get it, and in the other we do not. Though, therefore, Plutarch does not help us to understand
how art appeals to our intelligence, except in the mere fact of its power to copy, yet it is very remarkable that he thinks himself a champion of the intellect as concerned in the artistic pleasure of painful subjects, against the Epicureans,* who ascribed it to mere sensation without the countervailing pain of knowing the suffering to be real. But his only genuine advance upon Aristotle lies in the urgency which the problem of ugliness in art had acquired for him, as evinced by the very numerous examples which he gives of it (though not adequately distinguishing it from the painful and the immoral), and by the definiteness with which he states the strictly lesthetic problem, "Can the ugly, if represented in a way appropriate to it [in short, without falsification], be beautiful In estimating the value of Plutarch's answer, "It in art.-*" remains ugly, but we rightly take pleasure in it by reason of the intelligence involved in obtaining the likeness," we must not forget that the power to copy is a phase, though elementary, of the power to re-create by intelligence. And therefore to recognise a legitimate pleasure in the skill that copies what is ugly, is the germ of a recognition that what is apparently ugly, but admirable in art, has something in it which the trained perception can appreciate as beautiful. Dio Chrysostom, a Bithynian (a.d. 50-117), a writer of popular lectures on philosophical subjects, makes in two respects a distinct advance on what we know of his predecessors. First, he * recognises the ideal for art, quite in the opposite sense to that of Cicero, as a concrete form in which the artist gives adequate reality to conceptions which before and apart from such realisation are not definite so that the result is not that after seeing the Pheidian statue of Zeus every one
;
Su/tiroo-.
irpopx., I.e.
The
Epicureans,
it
seems, pointed out that the actor
can represent suffering better than the sufferer can. This is the point which Plutarch, if a true art-theorist, ought himself to have made, but does not make. 3 Dion. Chrys. de Dei Cognitione Orat, 12, p. 402, Reiske.
DIO CHRYSOSTOM.
lO^
can imagine something more beautiful but that after seeing it, no one can imagine the god in any other way. Obviously we are here on the track which Herodotus, with his naive profoundness, had entered 500 years before. particular case of this conception is the treatment of the human form^ as the most adequate visible symbol of the invisible quality of intelligence a striking anticipation of modern ideas, in some degree itself anticipated by the Xenophontic Socrates. And secondly, Dio Chrysostom examines the commonplace comparison between poetry and formative art with a view, not merely to the resemblances, but also to the differences between them drawing attention to the larger field open to language both in the kind of ideas represented, as it has words alike for the sensuous and the non-sensuous, and in the time and action^ included in its descriptions contrasted with the single moment and attitude into which the formative artist must compress all that he desires to convey. The above views are expounded in a criticism,* or rather panegyric of the Olympian Zeus of Pheidias, which reads almost as if the demands of Christianity were already stimulating the adherents of older creeds to demonstrate a spiritual and human significance in their own conception of deity. In Philostratus (first half of third century A.D.), author of the life of Apollonius of Tyana, and of the description of a real or imaginary collection of paintings at Naples, there is much matter of aesthetic interest. Two points are all to which attention can here be drawn. First, in the biography of Apollonius, the antithesis of
;
1 Id. ib., Reiske, 404. I translate this remarkable passage, " No sculptor For or painter can portray reason and wisdom as they are in themselves. having no perception or experience of such things, but knowing for certain in what they come to pass, we make it our resource, investing the god with the human body, the vessel of wisdom and reason seeking to manifest the imageless and unseen in the visible, which can be portrayed better than the way in which some of the barbarians make likenesses of their gods as
animals."
"We (sculptors) have to make each likeness in a single 410. which must be stable and permanent, and comprise in it the whole nature and quality of the god. But the poets may include many forms in their poetry, and ascribe movement and rest and actions and words to*
Id.
ib.,
attitude
their personages."
'
Dion. Chrysost. de Dei Cognitione Orat., 12.
no
imitation and imagination as two co-ordinate principles of art stated with the full consciousness of its novelty and imporApollonius ^ is attacking the Egyptian representations tance. of gods in animal forms. The Egyptian interlocutor retorts do you know your Greek representations are in effect, "
is
How
any
truer } Did your Pheidiases go up to heaven the gods' likenesses, or did something else guide
their
"Something else guided them a thing full of wisdom." "What was that? You cannot mention any "It was imagination that such thing, except imitation." these forms, a more cunning artist than imitation. wrought Imitation will make what it has seen, but imagination will make what it has not seen." [This does not necessarily
work?"
and take them in
mean
" the invisible," but
may
include
it].
But secondly, it is more remarkable still that this opposition, which in its unmitigated form is thoroughly vicious that is
imagination is treated not as directing but as supplanting the presentation of reality at once begins to shade off into the more modern idea of a mental (or, as we It is this inward imitative should say, imaginative) imitation. we are told for example, that makes us see the forms power, of animals in the clouds,^ which are not really there, or see a negro face drawn in white chalk as the portrait of a black
to say,
when
man. But though the opposition is thus mitigated, it is not destroyed. Inward or mental imitation does not for PhiloFor us, however, in view of stratus amount to imagination. He his instances, it is not easy to distinguish them. keeps very far indeed from compounding the fantastic with Rather, it would appear, he finds true the imaginative. imagination in the invention and suitability, the higher degree of significance and expression, which he esteems in a picture above truth to nature on the one band, and formal beauty on " Any one," he says, "professing to describe a the other. picture of Ariadne in Naxos, could paint a beautiful Theseus and a beautiful Ariadne, but the Dionysus is painted simply
Philostr.,
Vita Apoll.
Tyan.^
quellen
^
zur Geschichted. Bildenden
in Miiller, ii. 319, dWa Irux^ 810 ToB ovpavov <j>ip<T6(u, roye fXOVTK dvappvOfiCâvTe avrd Katiroutf.
Quoted
vi. I quote from Overbeck, Schrift19. Kiinste, 801, compared with Miiller, ii. 317. ft^ rovro ôvXei keyew Tocravra /aev aarffiA re
KOI
<i>s
em
tco êS, ^juxis 8c tjxvtra,
to luixiynKov
PLOTINUS.
I r I
as dictated by his love."^ How invention and expression are brought together in his conception may be illustrated by a curious piece of sentiment which he praises in a landscape, where a male palm tree leans across a stream so as to touch a female palm with its branches, forming a kind of bridge. The recognition of sentiment in landscape is an important datum in the history of art ; whether in this instance the sentiment is of the best kind is a different question. This recognition of imagination as the power of creating an adequate expression for intelligence and sentiment, places the conception of Philostratus on a higher level than the idealising imitation of Aristotle, in which the difficulty in what direction to idealise is not coped with as a matter of
principle.
V. Plotinus,
born in Egypt, 205
Ammonius Saccas
from 245
A.D.
till
a.d., a pupil of of Alexandria, taught in Rome
270 a.d. The tradition that from Christianity on account of its hostility to the arts and sciences may serve to remind us of the varied influences under which Neo-Platonism arose, although it does not appear ' to be ascertainable how far in fact Ammonius and Plotinus were acquainted with earlier Alexandrian speculations, or with Judaic or Christian theohis death in
Ammonius was an
apostate
logy.
It is natural to regard a non-Christian philosopher who writes in Greek in the century before Constantine as belonging to late antiquity but Plotinus has also been treated as belonging to the early middle age.* The doubt indicates his Neo-Platonism is a position better than any decision. Christianity, but in a disguise of half- Hellenic counter-part of It is, as we said before, a theory which curbs its freedom. the kind known as mystical which does not half-system, of
; ;
too spiritual, but that, intending to be wholly mean that it is really not spiritual enough ; for, like Christian spiritual, monasticism, it interprets the spiritual renunciation of the with It shares however world in a material fashion. Christianity the reaction against the still more partial systems
it is
1 Philostr., Imagines, i. 15, Miiller, ii. 324, oAA'oBrds yt o Atwuo-os ToB epav yiypwirrai. 2 Erdmann, E. Tr. i. 237. 8 Harnack, art. "Neo-Platonism," Encycl. Brit.
/xdvov
Erdmann,
I.e.
112
it rejects all compromise with that immediately preceded it has faith in a reality deeper than sensual self-seeking, and phenomenal nature, deeper than civic or national relations, deeper even than mind. L>ke Plato's Form of the Good, to which it corresponds in being above existence,* this Unity
;
or Primal God is above reason, and above the life of the world, which two latter principles are identified by historians with the Aristotelian " intelligence," and the Stoic "universal As derivative, these two elements are necessarily inlife."" ferior, and the adherence to this axiom of subordination, that the derived is necessarily below the original, distinguishes Neo-Platonism from a true evolutionary doctrine, such as was latent though not at first obvious in Christianity. But much as Plotinus renounces, in the way of knowledge and practical life, he refuses tb renounce material beauty. In the directness with which it is perceived beauty has an analogy to mystical intuition which often makes it find favour with those who think methodic science too circuitous for an
available avenue to truth. It is worth while to recall, in treating of Plotinus, those three antitheses by which we attempted to gauge the anticipations of a larger aesthetic that were to be found in Plato and Aristotle. It will be remembered that each of these antitheses corresponded to a characteristic feature not indeed of Greek
aesthetic theory, for as regards
two out of the three Greek theory fell short of an aesthetic standpoint, but of Greek conarranged them as ceptions relating to the beautiful. The antithesis of imitation and symbolism, corresponding i. "What kind of reality does art to the metaphysical problem " represent ? The antithesis of aesthetic and practical interest, correii. sponding to the moralistic problem " Is the content of beauty related to the will in the same way as the motives of practical
We
life?"
iii.
The
antithesis of abstract
and concrete
:
criticism, corre-
sponding to the true aesthetic problem " Is the nature of beauty exhausted by the formal definition which identifies it with the sensuous presentation of unity in variety, or is a wider and " deeper content traceable in it by observation and analysis ? saw that the limitations of purely Greek theory in these
We
en-e/ccica
T^s ovaiai, ep.
vi., p.
509.
Erdmann,
I.e.
SYMBOLISM IN PLOTINUS,
II3
several respects were intimately connected together, and it follows that no substantive advance could be made in one of the three problems without tending to stimulate an advance in respect of the other two. But the third being more directlydependent on experience and observation was capable of gaining considerably in depth and breadth of treatment during an interval in which speculation was unequal to readjusting the other two doctrines in conformity with this new analysis. And such an interval had elapsed, in spite of occasional gleams of philosophic intelligence, between Aristotle and Plotinus. Little of theoretical value either on the distinction between imitation and symbolism, or on the distinction between aesthetic
and
practical interest, has
been adduced
in
our review
ol
aesthetic reflection current during this period.
there is no reason to suppose that of the numerous writings which are lost any rose considerably above the philosophical level of those which have come down to us. Only in the later writers, such as the author of the treatise " on the Sublime," Dio Chrysostom, Philostratus, we find a tendency to recognise in so many words that art is not a mirror of common perception, but an expression of something great or reasonable in a sensuous form. Even this recognition, however, is so little elaborated in theory that it belongs rather to the deepest recognition of an expressiveness beyond mere formal symmetry than to a doctrine of
And
the relation between art and reality. o. Such a doctrine we do find in Plotinus.
symDoiiam.
j,gîjga.tion,
The
indeed always less than the idea, and the created less than the creator this is the point on which he is still Platonic, and which makes his theory one of emanation and not of evolution " but still," he continues, " if any one condemns the arts, because they create by way of imitation of nature, first we must observe that natural things themselves are an imitation of something further must bear [viz. of underlying reasons or ideas], and next we imitate the visible, but go in mind that the arts do not simply back to the reasons * from which nature comes and further, that they create much out of themselves, and add to that which is defective, as being themselves in possession of beauty since Pheidias did not create his Zeus after any perceived deigned to pattern, but made him such as he would be if Zeus
he
is
explaining,^
is
Creuzer's ed., p. 1002
XoyaiK.
114
appear to mortal eyes."
writer's intention to take
This passage leaves no doubt of the up the gauntlet thrown down by It seems natural, Plato in his "three removes from truth." ^ too, with Dio and Philostratus in our minds, to suppose that the truth claimed for the Pheidian statue is that of adequate symbolism for a god whose nature is spiritual, and not that of imaginative representation of a god who is material, though as a rule unseen by man. It is needless to enlarge here on the philosophical significance of this passage, which the discussion of Plato's position It is true that Plotinus has fully prepared us to appreciate.
retains the self-contradictory conception of spiritual or immaterial beauty by the side of the idea of natural beauty ; but
as the latter is not defined, or not merely defined, by its relation to the former, but is explained in terms of other attributes, the value of the theory as dealing with material is " beautiful material thing ^ is pronot seriously impaired. duced by participation in reason issuing from the divine." This sentence sums up the conception. Plato's whole terminology is modified and re-applied by Material beauty is still an image or a Plotinus in this sense. shadow, but it is an image or shadow issuing from reason, and appealing to the soul through the same power by which reason brings order into matter. portrait,' indeed, if it give the mere features and no more, is, as Plato would have called it, an image of an image, and thus Plotinus evokes from the Platonic view that deep aesthetic significance which we saw that it might really claim. Therefore the whole metaphysical assumption that art is limited by ordinary perception, which assumption is one with the imitative theory of fine art, is now broken through. It is henceforth understood that art is not imitative but symbolic. asthetio /3. What, then, is the nature of aesthetig interest interest, qj. jjjg j^^g ^f beauty, and is it distinct from practical interest or desire
.*
The answer
beautiful,
tion
In the material and not merely in the cunning of the artist's imitaas Aristotle" and Plutarch suggested, the soul recognises
is
1 '
B * Creua Creuzer, p. 102, Porphyry's Life of Plotinus.
unambiguous and complete.
Rep., X.
UGLINESS.
115
This affinity consists ^ in the participation in reason and form, and is co-extensive with the beautiful. For the ugly is either that which being capable of rational form has not received it or that which is incapable of rational form and refuses to be moulded by it. Hence beauty is only in the form, not in the material, and this must be so as it is the form alone ^ that can enter our apprehension. The exclusion of desire for the sensuous reality from the interest in the beautiful is effected by this view of aesthetic semblance as thoroughly as by that of Schiller. Thus, in strict theory, the moralistic limitation of beauty is thrown aside, as we foresaw, together with its metaphysical limitation. Beauty comes to be regarded as a direct expression of reason in sense by way of aesthetic semblance only and is therefore co-ordinate with morality and not subordinate to it. I do not say that Plotinus would necessarily interpret his own principle in its full breadth that would depend on the limits which he might assign to reasonableness of form. In this interpretation he might be influenced by his ascetic tendency but there is no room for doubt as to the bearing of
affinity to itself.
; ; ;
an
All that symbolises in sensuous or material form the laws or reasons eternally active in the world has a right, by this theory, to rank as beautiful. On the other hand, his conception of ugliness is defective, if we regard it as a defect to assert that nothing is ugly. For interpreted by modern views of nature, it would come to this. know of nothing that does not in one way or another " speak about " higher " and " lower symbolise reason. laws, but we know of nothing in which law is not revealed. ugliness If therefore we mean to maintain that real ugliness
his philosophical theory.
We
We
not beautiful can exist, we must set some limit to the idea that all is beautiful which symbolises reason. Whether such a limitation can be maintained, and with it the existence of real ugliness, is a great problem of modern It was at any rate a merit in Plotinus that he aesthetic. By doing so stated the question so broadly and clearly. he vastly extended the recognised province of beauty, in agreement with the need for such an extension which we saw
which
is
to
have been
all
practically
In
probability, however,
^
making itself felt in art and he would have classed as

*
criticism.
formless,
Creuzer, pp. loo-i.
Creuzer, p. 1003.
Il6
in accordance with the enlightened popular feeling even of our own day, which his theory fairly represents, much that
trained perception ought to recognise as full of form and beauty, and much again, which may be really ugly, but cannot be strictly called formless. For in reality nothing is formLogically speaking, he has confused the bare negative less. which is in fact a nonentity, with the positive opposite or confusion contrary. It is not absence of form, but false form of the forms appropriate to different things and meanings in
we must look for real ugliness. these considerations are refinements, only rendered possible by the broad comparison of beauty and ugliness as representing the rational and irrational, in which for the first time Plotinus brought the whole subject under one comprehensive point of view, capable of including the diverse forms and deeper sentiments of beauty which the age of transition had been developing. 7- As we should anticipate, the identification Concrete oriticiam. Qf beauty with mere symmetry, or unity in variety, is the limitation which makes aesthetic purely formal broken down when the beauty of art ceases to be subordinPlotinus repeatedly ated to the standards of ordinary reality. protests against the identification of beauty with symmetry and although the arguments by which he sustains his protest do not always appear to be sound, nor does he display a very consistent apprehension of any mode beyond that of mere symmetry or harmony in which reason can exhibit itself to sense, yet it is plain that he understood the growing need for a modification of aesthetic theory in this direction. I quote a
which,
if
anywhere,
Yet
all
passage which shows his main argument from feeling and

observation.^ " Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than the symmetry itself, and in this consists its charm. For why is the light of beauty rather on the living face, and only a trace of it on that of the dead, though the countenance be not yet disfigured in the symmetry of its substance and
;
why
are the more life-like * statues the more beautiful, though the others be more symmetrical and why is an uglier living man more beautiful than a statue of a beautiful one, except
.''
Ennead., iv. 7, 22. See Miiller, p. 313. See above ch. iv., p. 45, on Socrates in Xenophon.
CRITICISM OF "SYMMETRY.
117
that this (living beauty) is more desirable, and is so because it IS more of the nature of the good ? " And he even seems to have taken up the thought of the Xenophontic Socrates, and insisted that "the portrait painter must aim especially at catching the look of the eye, as the mind reveals itself in it more than in the conformation of the body." ^ This would certainly indicate a peculiar sensitiveness to the effects of painting, which, as Schasler points out, is significant with reference to the new relation which painting and sculpture were destined to assume in the later middle age. Of course "vitality" or "expression" must be embodied in some kind of symmetry, but as symmetry is a much wider and less definite attribute than vitality and expression, it is plain that we have here a great advance towards concrete;'
aesthetic theory.
|
however Plotinus supports his denial that beauty can consist in mere symmetry, by the argument that if so, the
simple parts of a beautiful whole, such as colour, lightning, the stars, could not be beautiful in themselves, whereas in reality a beautiful whole must have parts which are beautiful separately as well as in combination, he arouses a whole swarm of aesthetic questions to do which is in itself a great merit but does not escape serious confusion. To begin with, it is clear that a beautiful whole does not necessarily consist of parts which are beautiful in isolation. Again, although, as he alleges, some things which are relatively simple appear to be beautiful even taken by themselves, it is not certain that their beauty falls outside the explanation suggested by Plato for " pure " sounds and colours, which, of course, however simple, have parts in which their simplicity is manifested. And further, it is not easy to estimate Plotinus' own explana" The tion of the peculiar beauty which he finds in light. beauty of colour, which is simple, consists in its overcoming darkness by a principle which is immaterial, and is reason and form." Whether colour, considered as beautiful, is really simple, and is not rather, <ûa simple, merely pleasant, but ûa beautiful, suggestive of harmonies and relations whether Plotinus the spiritualist is not, like so many spiritualists, fascinated by the idea that an imponderable agent is somehow more akin to mind than heavy matter can be and whether, if
When
See Schasler,
i.
246
Il8
light does
plies
conquer obscurity by producing lucidity, this imany element of beauty deeper than those involved in order and symmetry, are questions which present themselves at once in dealing with this conception. Leaving these difficulties, which it is enough to point out, it must be observed
is connected with the immense importance which Plato's comparison between the Sun and the Good had in Neo-Platonism, and that from a purely sesthetic point of view he falls behind Aristotle by the comparatively slight attention which he pays to music as a medium of spiritual expression. It was this, we remember, that so strangely and suggestively perverted the mimetic terminology of Aristotle music, he observed, had a higher expressive or imitative capacity than the formative arts. And in this conception, if freely interpreted, we saw a foreshadowing of the profoundest modern romanticism. For Plotinus, music is of course an audible symbol of inaudible harmonies, but it is beautiful only in a secondary degree as compared with painting, whereas we should have expected that a thinker of his tendency would have developed the suggestion of Aristotle, and recognised music as a pre-eminently spiritual art. If, as seems probable, some superstition about the immaterial affinities of light was the cause of this non-recognition, we have here an example of the law that quasi-poetic imagination, when admitted into philosophy, blinds, the intelligence to what
that Plotinus' devotion to light
truly of poetic value. The creative impulse of Hellenic philosophy ended with Plotinus, For more than two centuries after his death in
is
it does not died about forty years before their closing in 529, and was the last considerable Greek philosopher, added anything of serious importance to the ideas of Plotinus, which he systematised. have now traced the history of the Hellenic formulse relating to beauty, and have endeavoured to indicate not only the conditions of their formation and the degrees by which they were stretched and ultimately broken, but also the
270
A.D. the schools of
Athens remained open, but
appear that Proclus,
who
We
actual force that was at work in the concrete perception of the beautiful as it first strained and then snapped them. The definite antagonism of the sensuous and the spiritual world
intelligible
the latter being regarded as something more and other than an system or better understanding of phenomena
AND
"
MODERN.
19
meant the disintegration of ancient thought, and the genesis of what on the great scale of world-history may fairly be called the modern mind. It may be indeed that what we thus distinguish as "modern" will one day be called "mediaeval," and that we shall learn to date perhaps from Shakespeare or from Goethe the inception of an aesthetic mood which is symbolic like that of the middle age, but without its arbitrary mysticism, and
unartificial,
like that of classical Greece, but free from its imitative naturalism. For the present however it is enough to note the original growth of that deeper and subtler consciousness, which however its antagonisms may be reconciled, can never, having once appeared, be substantially lost to the world, and which must for ever form the ultimate distinction
between
classical antiquity
and
all
that in the most pregnant
sense can be called modern.

a (p. 57, notei). Observe however in Metrodorus (answer to Posidippus, who wrote in 3rd cent. B.C.) tVe first definite allusion to "the charm of nature." I owe this reference to the kindness of Mr. Mackail. I need hardly refer the reader to Mr. b (p. 90). This judgment seems quite wrong. Mackail's Historj of Latin Literature for a true estimate. On the contrary, the subject, as I learn from Mr. Mackail's History, was c (p. 91). I still think my mention of it not wholly often treated in the Alexandrine period.
irrelevant.
d
an
gd's (P- 97)effect of smallress, it is

1
"
house." If this implies that, e.g., the Parthenon or Propylaea produce " surely quite wrong. They are, in effect, among the " biggest
buildings of the WMld.

e (p.
14). Aristotle's suggestions
went
further.
See Butcher,
op, ctt.,
155 note, and Ar. de
Part.
Anim. 64S a
4.
CHAPTER
VI.
SOME TRACES OF THE CONTINUITY OF THE ESTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE AGES.
It
is natural,
especially for the Protestant peoples of Europe,
to regard the Renaissance as the beginning of modern life. The long struggle for intellectual and political freedom which still gives the tone to our aspirations, appears to us to have had its starting point in the revival of Greek learning, and the awakening of physical science. And we have therbre been
too apt to think even of the Renaissance in poetty and formative art as a new departure, stimulated from without, and forming portion of a homogeneous development rather into the times that followed, than out of the times that wen; before.
But any such view is coming to be less and less approved by the deepest and most sympathetic criticism and thus it will be worth while (i) to put together some indications of a growing tendency in modern thought to pursue the roots of the Renaissance further and further back into the earlier middle age, before (2) attempting a very slight sketch of the intellectual attitude assumed by the mediaeval Church and its greatest thinkers towards formative art and the sense of beauty.
;
^^ *^^ movement of the Renaissance in ^' poetry and fine art passed from the oroductive to S i i the critical stage, it was natural that criticism Christian Era. gjjQyjjj fj^gj juj-n its attention to the later phases of production, which were in many senses nearer to itself. Just as scholarship travelled back to the Hellenic world by way of the Greco-Roman, and was long before it distinguished Zeus and Athene from Jupiter and Minerva, so it would seem as if aesthetic interest was first attracted by the fuU-bbwn and later Renaissance, both in letters, in painting, and ir architecture, and only worked backward by degrees to " Gotiic" buildings all know the beautiful passage and early Tuscan painters. in Goethe's autobiography,^ in which he supports the noble
Tendency to extend Benaissance back towards

We
Wahrheii
u.
Dichtung, Werke, 17, 347-8,
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT.

paradox, "
121
What youth desires, old age abounds in," by his having lived to enjoy the awakened interest of others in Gothic architecture, the study of which had fascinated him in his youth. The art lectures of our own Academicians show the need of a similar retrogression.^ We find in them, indeed, some slight references to Cimabue, because of Vasari's conspicuous mention of him, but hardly a word of Giotto, and not a word of Botticelli or Fra Angelico. The Caracci's, on the
other hand, are continually in the writers' minds, just as Lessing's criticism was first directed to the Gallicising poets of his own day. The brilliancy of the first years of the sixteenth century seems to have marked that period as the true point of departure, and attention was given by preference rather to what came after it than to what went before. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 furnished a conveniently definite reason, and in some degree a real cause, to which this great effect could be attributed and so the term Renaissance in its narrowest acceptation indicates the influence of Greek studies
;
antiquities on art and letters, an influence which had, however, in fact begun before the latter half of the fifteenth century, to which it is usually ascribed. Because of this usage, the word has often to-day a disparaging connotation with reference to the history of art and architecture, which is apt to perplex the student who interprets it more generally. iThe present century has seen this tendency Pre-Kaphaeute Painting, reversed, at least in England, by the aesthetic movement, of which the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was a symbol, but which acted in conjunction with many fundamental impulses of the age, and, in short, with the whole principle of evolutionary science and history. It is quite plain that this general movement, which includes a strong bias against the assumption of purely extraneous causes for any development within a society, has shifted the centre of our interest in Italian formative art to a point rather before than after the close of the fifteenth century, and has pushed back its further limit to the first signs of change in the practice of painters, that is to say to the middle of the thirteenth century.
and
As
our
for architecture,
interest,
Renaissance
we shall see directly that in it the later may now be said to form the nearer frontier of
while the remoter boundary has gone back to the

'
Barry, Opie, Fuseli, between 1790
and 18 10.
122
very threshold of the earliest middle age. But when this more comprehensive scope is given to our care for the Renaissance, the term itself has lost its narrow reference to the revival of Greek letters in the fifteenth century, and has been extended in conformity with its literal import to the whole movement and aspiration revealed in Dante and Giotto
and
their successors.
" ^^'^ being so, however, the principle is conceded that the European movement known as the Renaissance was not purely dependent on stimulation from without, and we are driven to trace its genesis yet further back than the time of Dante. cannot refuse to see in the early French stories written as we have them during the thirteenth century, but older no doubt in their origin and circulation, a Renaissance within the middle age,^ on which
oeSSy Rr^ch
uterature.
We
the signs of the new spirit are distinctly impressed. Mr. Pater's quotation from The Friendship of Amis and Amile should be read in the beautiful setting he has furnished for it" by those who desire to realise the many sidedness of the romantic sentiment embodied in these matin songs of modern Europe. notice in them on the one hand the tenderness and sensitiveness of romanticism, and more especially its delight in beautiful workmanship, the carved wooden cups of Amis and Amile playing the part almost of persons in the story and on the other hand we are struck by the outburst of passionate rebellion against a dogma, once spiritual, but now grossly material, and hostile to human feeling. Nothing is more extraordinary in view of our common notions about the Dark Ages, than the audacity alike of sentiment and of speculation that we meet with inside their bounds. One famous outburst of such audacity I think it well to reproduce from the story of Aucassin et Nicolette. It is the passage to which Mr. Pater refers as sounding a note of rebellion too strident for his pages. Aucassin is threatened with exclusion from heaven, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. "You will never," the adviser concludes, "enter into Para-
We
dise."
I am following, of course, non passibus cequis, the delightful study in Pater's Renaissance called " Two Early French Stories."
Mr
Renaissance, Essay
ABELARD.
" In Paradise
12^
?
what have
to
do
" is
Aucassin's answer.
to enter there, but only to have NicoIettCs sweet love, whom I love so. None go to Paradise but those whom I will tell you. There go the old priest and the halt
I
"
do not seek
my
and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before the altars and in the old crypts, and those that are clothed in old shabby cloaks and old rags naked and barefoot and sansculotte, who die of hunger and poverty and cold and misery. These to Paradise with these I have nought to do. But to hell fo will go for to hell go the fair scholar, and the fair knight who dies in tournays and noble wars, and the good squire and the free man. With them I will go. There too go the beautiful courteous ladies, who have two or three lovers, with their husbands, and there go the gold and silver and the precious furs, and there go the harper and the minstrel, and the kings of this world. With these I will go, only I must have with
; ;
words were probably written Aquinas, who was Dante's guide in theology, we begin to understand how deep rooted in the life of the age were the contrasts of dogma and romance which amaze us in the Inferno. "Z.g bel clerc" these words, sound like an echo of the too famous personal history which so tragically embodied this antagonism. Aueiaid. For a little further back, in the first half of iii. the twelth century, lies the troubled career of Abelard, whom we are here to consider, not as a philosopher, but as the actor in a real tragedy, which must have deeply affected the feeling of the age, and as the writer of the letters to Heloise, and of In songs in the vernacular which the Paris students sang. the actual incidents of his fate, as in the mediaeval legend of Tannhauser,^ we see no mere vulgar aberration, but a rebellion, relatively justifiable, against conditions and ideas which mankind was not destined permanently to endure. The claim upon the sympathy of the age, which is embodied in the divine forgiveness as represented in the Tannhauser legend, must also, one would think, have been recognised in Abelard. It has been well observed^ that Dante, by omitting so familiar a name from the Divina Commedia, almost seems to refuse tO' judge him.
recall
me my sweet When we
love, Nicolette."
that these
in the lifetime of
Thomas
The comparison
is
drawn from Mr.
Pater's Menaissance.
Mr.
Pater,
I.e.
124
iv.
back the signs of the the beginning of the Century. twelfth century, before the sculptures of Poitiers or of Chartres, which are perhaps the earliest indications of a revival in the higher formative crafts, as contrasted with mere architectural decoration. In these higher crafts of sculpture and painting, as also in the highest of all arts, the art of poetry, it appears that a long period of barrenness or rigidity preceded the development of the twelfth and later centuries. For this we shall in part be able to account when we discuss But the roots of the Renaissance the attitude of the Church.
ArcMteeture
We have now traced

spirit
^k
" ^^"^.issance " "tostea
to
must be pursued further still. For we must again insist on what was alluded to in the last chapter, that the age of beautiful architecture, while it includes the centuries of which we have just been speaking, extends upwards in an unbroken continuity from them to the time of In the later Renaissance, on the other hand, the Justinian. tradition is severed, and whatever the merits or defects of the architecture that followed, it no longer springs organically from that which went before. It is quite natural that the great artistic craft which is rooted in necessity and does not intentionally represent imaginative ideas, should be the one to maintain itself through the inrush of uncultured peoples into Christendom and through the disputes and misunderstandings of a creed, prone to the heresy
that the spirit is essentially hostile to the flesh. Including those crafts of decoration which do not necessarily deal with the human figure, and therefore escape questionings aroused by anthropomorphism, architecture was well able to represent and carry forward the impulse of freedom and individuality, which was one day to find a fuller expression in the achievements of painting, music and poetry. I have at this point no alternative but to supplement the quotation which I made in the last chapter, with reference to the architecture and decoration of the Roman decadence, by others from the same author,^ dealing with the early days of that " modern," or medieval
architecture " Spalato
which sprang from it. was built about 323 a.d., St. Sophia in 530. More than 200 years are between them, by no means fertile
1882.
Cf.
1 Mr. Wm. Morris, in Lectures on Art, Macmillan, Middleton, Encycl. Brit,, art. " Sculpture."
Prof.
THE "true renaissance."
125
of beautiful or remarkable buildings, but St, Sophia once built, the earth began to blossom with beautiful buildings, and the thousand years that lie between the date of St. Sophia and the date of St. Peter's at Rome may well be called the building age of the world. But when those years were over, Italy at least, the change was fully come and as a symbol of that change there stood on the site of the great mass of history and art, which was once called the Basilica of St. Peter, that new Church of St. Peter which still curses the mightiest city of the world the very type, it seems to me, of pride and tyranny, of all that crushes out the love of art in simple people, and makes art a toy of little estimation for the idle hours of the rich and cultivated." ^ " But, one thing came of it [of freedom in the realm of art at least] in those earlier days an architecture pure in its principles, reasonable in its practice, and beautiful to the eyes of all men, even the simplest." " It was a matter of course that the art of pattern designing should fully share in the exaltation of the master art. Now at last, and only now,^ it began to be really delightful in itself good reason why, since now at last the mind of a man, happy in his work, did more or less guide all hands that wrought it. No beauty in the art has ever surpassed the beauty of those, its first days of joy and freedom, the days of gain without loss the time of boundless hope. I say of gain without loss the qualities of all the past styles which had built it up are there, with all that it has gained of new. The great rolling curves of the Roman Acanthus have not been forgotten, but they have had life, growth, variety, and refinement infused into them the clean-cut accuracy and justness of line of one side of Greek ornament have not been forgotten, nor the straying wreath-like naturalism of the other side of it but the first has gained a crisp sparkling richness and freedom and suggestion of nature which it had lacked before and the second, which was apt to be feeble and languid, has gained a knitting-up of its lines into strength, and an interest in every curve, which make it like the choice parts of the very growths of nature. Other gain it has of richness and mystery, the most necessary of all the qualities of pattern work, that without which, indeed,
'.
Lectures on Art, p. 131. I understand the writer to be referring, in the tion of St. Sophia. See Prof. Middleton, I.e.
^
first
instance, to the decora-
126
it
must be kept in the strictly subordinate place which the good taste of Greece allotted to it." The writer goes on to point out that Byzantine art rather made the character of what we call Eastern art, than derived its own character from what Eastern art then was, although the East had much to do with the new life of this which he calls the " true Renais" But surely," he continues, " when we have sought sance." our utmost for the origins of all the forms of that great body of the expression of men's thoughts which I have called modern art (you may call it Gothic art if you will, little as the Goths dealt with it), when we have sought and found much, we shall still have to confess that there is no visible origin for the thing that gave life to those forms. All we can say is, that when the Roman tyranny grew sick, when that recurring curse of the world, a dominant race, began for a time to be shaken from its hold, men began to long for the freedom of art and that even amid the confusion and rudeness of a time when one civilisation was breaking up that another might be born of it, the mighty impulse which this longing gave to the expression of thought created a glorious art, full of growth and hope, in the only form which at such a time art could take architecture to wit which of all the forms of art is that which springs direct from popular impulse, from the partnership of all men, great and little, in worthy and exalting aspirations. So was modern or Gothic art created, and never till the time of
scientific
;
that death or cataleptic sleep of the so-called Renaissance, did it forget its origin." Here, we are to observe, the art of the sixth century a.d. is referred to as the sign of " the true Renaissance," which does not mean a rebirth of " classical " forms, but rather a rebirth
of the human spirit in a vesture entirely new, though woven out of the robes it had laid aside. must bear in mind, however, that great works of individual origination in the expressive arts are not to be found during the six centuries which we have just traversed so lightly and although it is not hard to explain this phenomenon, yet it cannot be explained away.
We
ciiriBUan Art
V.
But we may go
""êSrt
-earliest
""*
"
As if in
at least one step further. anticipation of the sixteenth century, the
centuries.
Renaissance."
*
Church was becoming humanistic, in a best and This saying of the same writer ^ who
Mr. Pater, Marius the Epicurean,
vol.
ii.
141.
BEFORE CONSTANTINE.
127
pointed us to the French or Provengal Renaissance of early romance, refers to the second century of our era the minor "peace of the Church " under the Antonines. At this time, it is suggested, before those conflicts of body and soul which preceded or characterised the later " peace of the Church under Constantine, she was "truer than perhaps she ever would be again to that element of profound serenity in the soul of her founder, which reflected the eternal goodwill of God to man, in whom,' according to the oldest version of the angelic message, He is well pleased " The signs which indicate some such frame of mind in the Church before Constantine appear to be
'
'
'
from which an early development of liturgical music, analogous to that described by Augustine as recently introduced at Milan, may be inferred to reach back, though in less ceremonial forms,^ to New Testament times. b. The remains of early Christian painting in the catacombs, of which some part may belong to very early years, though the more complete frescoes probably come down to the fourth century. What is remarkable in these oldest relics of Christian art is in the first place the complete adoption of a simple symbolism, resting partly on Scripture and partly on natural allegory, in which the cross, the lamb, the fish,^ the stag (after the Psalm, " As the hart panteth "), and the phoenix or peacock, all stand directly for ideas belonging to the faith, symbols such as these having for unlettered minds an extraordinary power of comfort and fascination, when they have become the vehicles of a common experience and a common hope. And in the second place, as pictorial capacity
a.
^
The
allusions
increases among the Christians, there arises the habit of representing scenes from the life of Jesus, never in childhood nor in suffering, but always as a godlike man in some happy or triumphant activity, as the Good Shepherd (with an echo of Hermes), or in the entrance into Jerusalem, or even before Pilate or again, as the teacher among His disciples, or under the form of Orpheus, who also overcame death, and tamed the
;
The Council The
of Laodicea, 367 a.d., restricted singing in church to the

iii.
trained choir.
2
Carriere,
94
ff.
first letters
of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour,

for fish.
form the Greek word
128
HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. a Phrygian cap, playing the lyre
fiercest creatures, in
among
wild beasts.^
sacred poetry of the early Church do not appear to have attained independent poetical rank,* but, beginning with some verses quoted or written by Clement of Alexandria in the end of the second century, and going on through Nazianzen in the fourth century and Synesius in the fifth, they evince ' a completely new force and freedom in, so to speak, taking possession of the universe with all its strength and majesty, as something that shares, in its degree, man's This relation does not appear to be relation to the Creator. it is rather either argumentatively or fantastically conceived
c.
The hymns and
as the content of a faith and a ground The Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Psalms, for prayer. no doubt had a profound influence on this mood and its expression but the doctrine of the incarnation, which seem.s generally to be near at hand in these hymns, immensely strengthens what I have ventured to call the sense of possession or proprietorship which replaces for the Christian the Judaic sense of inaccessibility or remoteness in the Creator. In this feeling, which is very strongly marked in the Synoptic Gospels, we unquestionably have one and that the most fundamental note of the Christian attitude towards beauty. But yet Christian art had far to go and much to suffer before it could realise this aspiration of its early days. It is worth while to adduce two quotations from the prose literature of the fourth century, which show first the profound sense of unity with the world that survived down to that time among Christians and secondly, this same unity just beginning to rend itself in the long struggle which was probably unavoidable if its full depth was ever to be realised. Gregory of Nyssa writes " When I see every hilltop, every valley, every plain covered with fresh sprung grass, and then the various array of the trees, and at my feet the lilies, doubly furnished by nature, both with pleasant scent and with beauty
directly
and simply
felt,
See an elaborate treatment of early Christianity in all its aesthetic aspects iiL, 77-138, and cf. for the catacombs, Prof. Middleton, in Encycl. Brit, " Mural Decoration." * It is now thought that Gregory of Nazianzus was not the author of the Euripidean tragedy on " the suffering Christ," which used to be ascribed to See his life, Encycl. Brit. him. 3 I judge from the translations in Carriere, l.c.
^
in Carriere,
SYMPATHY WITH NATURE.

of colour
;
29
when in the distance I behold the sea, to which the wandering cloud leads the way, my mind is seized by a melancholy which is not without happiness and when in autumn the fruits [corn ?] disappear, the leaves fall and the boughs are left bare, we are absorbed in the thought of the eternal and continuously recurring change in the accord of the marvellous forces of nature. Whoever apprehends this with the intelligent eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man compared with the greatness of the universe." And Chrysostom " When you look at gleaming buildings, and the aspect of colonnades allures your eye, then turn at once to the vault of heaven and to the free plains in which herds graze at the water's brink. Who does not despise all the creations of art when at dawn in the stillness of his heart he admires the rising sun, as it sheds or, when resting by a spring its golden light over the earth in the deep grass or under the dark shade of thick-leaved trees, he feasts his eye on the far distance vanishing in the haze ?" I do not think that we can be mistaken in saying that these passages show a sympathy with nature which is quite of a modern type. But in both of them this feeling is beginning to turn agaihst the sense of worth in man and his productions, and so doing to cut at its own root. Nothing could be more pregnant than this opposition, more especially in the second passage, where it is specifically directed against architecture, On the one hand it emphasises unmisthe non-imitative art.
;
takably a new attitude of aesthetic perception to external nature, the like of which we have not found in any Hellenic or Greco- Roman writer, but on the other hand it betrays
a
in
faint
shadow of
that
hostility to
artificial
iri
beauty which
maimed
doing
the higher imaginative arts so, deadened in the end man's sensibility even to
is
the middle age, and
natural loveliness.
ground, then, for the suggestion which finds the earliest Renaissance in the earliest age of peace experienced by the Christian Church after it became a completed organism ^ and it is not to be denied that the Founder of Christianity* looked out upon the external world with free and
There
See Marius the Epicurean, ii. 135. doubt whether such disinterested apprehension of floral beauty so " Consider the lilies of free from moralising or allegory as that of the text, the field," can be found outside, or prior to, the Christian intelligence.
* I
130
friendly eyes, or that the ultimate tendency of this religion is to make man feel that the world and he himself are parallel expressions of one and the same Divinity. "^^^^^ y^^ ^^^""^ seems to be another side to Necessit of an Vntervafof" this question. The half-Hellenic cheerfulness, in
gujjjgcts and treatment, of the catacomb-paintings, the abounding grace and force of some early Christian sculptures,^ and the naive devotion of the early hymns and sacred odes, could scarcely perhaps have led by direct development to so great a range and depth of characterisation, as that which reveals itself in the twelfth century and after. The later dogmatic and ascetic tendency may no doubt be said to have laid fetters on the highest uses of art but was it not necessary that the opposition between the spirit and the flesh should be pushed to the furthest point, both within the realm of art, and between art and dogma, in order that the entire gamut of expression might be mastered, and that the arduousness of the task, to represent all that there is in man, might not be understated ? If the God-like or heroic Christ had never passed into the man of sorrows, if crucifixions and martyrdoms and the forms of emaciated ascetics had never been brought within the range of representation, would not an element have been wanting to the complex expressiveness of Botticelli and Leonardo, and to the modern feeling, which is And if no our peculiar pride, for a beauty as wide as life party in the Church had maintained, and no Council had too decided, that " Christ in His glorified humanity was . exalted to be figured by human art in an earthly material, after the analogy of any other human body," * would there have existed, when imagination at length came to its rights, the full sense of mystery which Raphael, for example, embodied in the Divine child of the Sistine Madonna ? It is said that the Christian painters attained a mastery over the expression of the face long before they could deal adequately with the figure, whereas with Greek sculptors the order was Such a contrast, which is certainly charthe reverse of this. acteristic, only applies to the Christian art of a later age, and not to that of the first four centuries. But none the less it is true that the re-birth of humanity
;
Austerity,
.*
1 Carriere, *
iii. 1 14. Prof. Middleton in Eneycl. Brit, art. " Sculpture." Council of 754, not oecumenical. Eneycl. Brit., art. " Image-worship."
CHRISTIAN DUALISM.
131
began with the Christian era, or rather, as we said in the last chapter, long before it and the apparent aberrations of the later middle age were but necessary grades in the process which vindicated the full breadth and intensity of the human
;
ideal.
conception of Plotinus, which destroyed the theoretical restriction of piotinuB. beauty to formal symmetry and of art to imitation, was essentially maintained whether or no in direct inheritance from its author by the intellectual consciousness of Christendom. It was, as we have seen, only an application of the thought of Plato, for which everything visible or material was a sign or counterpart of something invisible or immaterial. In a dialogue ^ of Scotus Erigena, who might be called the last Neo-Platonist and the first Scholastic,^ the " teacher " says, " Consider whether these local and temporal recurrences of the parts of this visible universe are devoid of a certain mystery or not," to which the "disciple" replies, " I could not readily affirm that they are devoid of mystery
cSntouir^f
^'
ffiBtiietio
^^^ profound
from finally
for there is nothing, as I think, of visible and corporeal objects which does not signify somewhat incorporeal and
[purely] intelligible." Scholastic disputes about the logical or metaphysical existence of universals do not touch this fundamental conviction, which, formulated by Plato after the great age of Hellenic art, sank deep into the European intellect under the influence of the so-called decadence, including the birth of Christianity, and governed the modern perception of beauty till rationalised by the later Renaissance. For the time, therefore, the consciousness of Christendom was dualistic, as opposed to the naturalistic monism of the ordinary Hellenic creed before Plato. But the Christian dualism was only the outward sign of an arduous struggle to realise a higher or spiritual monism. From the first and throughout history a sense of reconciliation was active in the Christian faith, how-
ever militant.
Thus
the slight indications of the mediaeval attitude to-
wards beauty, which are all that can be dealt with here, appear to indicate a remarkable circuit of theory, beginning with a special sympathy for nature as opposed to the works of
|
^ I?e Divisione Mundi, 3, ninth century. Art. " Scholasticism," Encycl. Brit.
132
man
in the Christian successors of Plotinus (in the same age which adopted evolutionary monism as the root of orthodox theology), passing through a phase of hostility to the higher and more human arts in the destruction of Paganism and the iconoclastic controversy, and ending with a complete recognition of a more significant beauty as the manifestation of the Divine both through art and nature in the age of St. Francis, St. Thomas, Dante, and Giotto. This whole circuit is determined, as constantly happens
with dualistic theoqes, by a shifting location in empirical The reality of the two factors which constitute the dualism. underlying conception is that nature and art, belonging to the visible ^ universe, are beautiful if and in as far as they worthily symbolise the Divine power and goodness, and conBut sequently do not appeal to sensuous interest or desire.
their respective fitness for this purpose is differently judged at different times, and the course of this judgment reminds us in some degree of Plato's speculation, especially when nature is reckoned as nearer to the creative original than art, when art is
condemned as unable
to portray divinity, or
when
all
beauty, whether of nature or of art, is rejected as a mere There seems always, however, to be in stimulus to sense. the background, more positively than in Plato, at least the conditional admission that material beauty is divine, if rightly and purely seen. ! We should note, to begin with, that in the From Emanation
fourth century, some two generations after the death of Plotinus, the great step from emanation to evoluto Evolution,
tion
was irrevocably made by Christian dogma in the settlement of the Homoousian dispute. Whether this idea is or is not in the sense of the Synoptic Gospels, it certainly marks the final and essential abandonment of heathenism, and the climax to which Platonism and Neo-Platonism had gradually been approximating. There can be developed, it affirms, out of the one supreme principle of the world, a progressive and active content, which does not lose anything, nor become
extraordinary prominence given to the sense of sight in this antifrom Plato downwards necessarily governs our terminology, and theory has sometimes, as we shall see in St. Thomas, suffered from this prominence, which arises both from obvious reasons in the nature of the sense, and probably also from the metaphysical convenience of analogies founded on it as well as from historical causes.
1
The
thesis
DISTRUST OF ART.
133
secondary, by the fact of this development. However verbal or pedantic this may appear to us to-day, it is, if contrasted with the ideas of the greatest Greeks, excepting perhaps Aristotle, a necessary protest against a pessimistic limitation. It denies the rule of progress to be that the first is best, the second a little less perfect, and the third more imperfect still. iiAnd thus we saw how in this fourth century Dualism and Love of Nature, ôth Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa, like the early Christian hymn-writers, fully recognised the beauty of material nature as the direct work and symbol of Divinity, and even accented this recognition by a tendency to disparage, in comparison, the works of man. As early, indeed, as the year 306 a.d. a Spanish Synod * had decided that " pictures ought not to be in a church, lest that which is worshipped and adored be painted on walls," and the genesis of iconoclasm goes back in part to the Decalogue and the Judaic element in Christianity. In the language of philosophy this tendency of the fourth century a.d. means that the dualism between sense and spirit is first asserting itself in antagonism to what is most plainly of human origin, as in the modern sentiment that " God made the country and man made the town." Audaciously as this antithesis inverts the true relation of things, it performs a temporary service to culture by forcing into prominence the charm of external
nature.
But such an
effect,
if isolated,
must be transient
the beauty fixed in art must soon Before threaten the sense of a beauty perceivable in nature. this comes to pass, however, the momentary situation leaves a permanent result in Augustine's account of beauty, dealing, as is natural from his theological position, rather with the world than with fine art, which he, like others of his time,
a dualism which condemns
was beginning
nniverse."
to distrust.* In his early life, on '^BeautyV books on the Beautiful

iii.
j^^^^ j^^
^^^
^^^
he tells us,' he had written and Fit, about which writlonger cared, nor knew whether
Art. " Image-worship," nty'c/. Brit. Elvira. Augustine lived 354-430 a.d. He expressed disapproval of looking for There is a letter Christ on painted walls rather than in the written word. ascribed to Eusebius of Caesarea, early fourth century, addressed to the sister of Constantine, refusing a request for a picture of Christ as unlawful, and saying that he had taken away from a lady friend pictures of Paul and Christ which C(?/:, iv. 13. she possessed, ^wo*^/. -ff?., art. " Image-worship."
1
Synod of
134
His former interest, however; sufficed they existed or not. to furnish him with a formal doctrine of beauty, which is indicated by the above-mentioned title, and does not in general go beyond the conception of symmetrical relations between What is peculiar to him and parts as belonging to a whole. constitutes an advance that merits more attention than it receives, is the application of this view, specially supported by the analogy of fine art, to the universe as a whole considered By reason of as containing evil or ugliness (deformitas). due of course to a theological motive, his this application, view receives a deeper content than the easygoing providential creed of Cicero, which in general expression it very
greatly resembles. The variety correlative to unity in ancient formal aesthetic is deepened by Augustine into the opposition of contraries. This he considers to be essentially included within the synimetry of the universe, as in a beautiful song,^ or in the anti-
theses of rhetoric, or in the shadows of a picture, which do Poisons, dangerous not make it ugly if rightly placed. like, all have their due place in the world, animals, and the have here nothing and so far are elements in its beauty. to do with the question whether this bold treatment of sin and suffering can be justified theologically but its aesthetic bearing, which in Augustine's hands is very decidedly emphasised, brings us at once up to the level of modern popular theory with reference to ugliness, such as we find implied in The essence of this poetical or orthodox sentiment to-day. theory is to recognise the ugly as a subordinate element in the beautiful, to which it serves as a foil,* contributing however on the whole to an effect which is harmonious or symmetrical quite or almost in the traditional sense. And it has the merit of attacking the problem of ugliness more directly than
We
1 Z>. Ctv. Dei, xi. i8, 23; xxii. 19. I quote the title of xi. 18. "De pulchritudine universitatis, quse per ordinationem Dei etiam ex contrariorum I do not know of what kind the " antitheta " in fit oppositione luculentior." a song would be ; I suspect it of simply meaning the responses as sung by In that case, the comthe two sides of the choir under Ambrose at Milan. parison from music has not the modernism of a reference to discord. Augustine's modernism in one doctrine, that of the certainty implied in doubt, " Si dubitat, cogitat," etc., has been mentioned above, p. 78. s < \vhy rushed the discord in, but that harmony should be prized." Browning's " Abt Vogler."
COLOUR AND SYMMMRY.
35
any Greek could attempt, more directly than Plutarch, who excluded the ugly from art except as an evidence of artistic skill, and than Plotinus, unless we interpret his view of the formless so as to give it a positive and not merely a negative bearing. It belongs to an intermediate stage between the abstract and the concrete perception of beauty. Symmetry, it admits, may be enriched by contrast, but symmetry andi
not characteristic expressiveness is still the ruling principle. It is a note of this popular view to insist on the small quantitative proportion in which it alleges the ugly to exist relatively to the beautiful, and this popular note we find in Augustine as in modern sentiment. But this is not really a consideration of any speculative importance, and tends to confuse the subordination of ugliness to beauty as a factor, with the overpowering of our sense of ugliness by the greater mass of the beautiful which, if that were all, would be a mere inaccuracy in our perceptions. There is historical interest in the stress laid by Augustine on the element of colour as a part of beauty in addition to symmetry. saw that when Socrates conversed about beauty with Parrhasius, the painter was familiar with colour and symmetry as features in the beautiful, although Socrates' account of expression was new to him.^ The same two terms are adduced by Plotinus in the forefront of his discussion as representing the sesthetic tradition which he censures as inadequate but the strange thing is, that in spite of this, they descended as an adequate account of the beautiful to Thomas Aquinas through the pseudo-Dionysius," who has very much Here, too, in Augustine, about in common with Plotinus. the contemporary of the pseudo-Dionysius, we find them occupying the same unquestioned place,' as though the conspicuous reference of Plotinus to these terms had had more permanent effect than his criticism of them. I transcribe a
We
passage from Augustine which illustrates this point, and also has an interest from containing a thought which reappears " The beauty of any material object is in Dante's Paradiso.*
Xen., Mentor., 3, 10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologice, secunda pars secundse partis Sect.
145, wliich quo.tes Dionysius by name. ^ De. Civ. Dei, xi. 22, "moles" mass, in contrast to symmetry, and Augustine's view that size is indifferent in beauty, also remind us of Plotinus. * De. Civ. Dei, xxii. 19.
136
congruence of parts together with a certain sweetness^ of colour. But how great will be the sweetness of colour when the righteous shall shine forth like the sun in the
.
kingdom of
Suppression of
their Father."
iv.
we saw just now, allowed to ^s ''i^^^' ^*^ ^^^^y writings on the BeautaSSS^- P^*'*s'^ texity. tiful and the Fit, which we should have valued so highly. Yet his whole view of the universe had a stronglyaesthetic tinge, and we must be careful how we interpret as a datum of the history of aesthetic, the violent suppression of Paganism which took place in his lifetime by the edicts of Theodosius, " with the loud and unanimous applause of the The widespread destruction of temples Christian world." * with their decorations, and their abandonment to decay, tells of religious hostility combined with brutal indifference to art but we must remember that the Parthenon, though disfigured in the fifth century by its conversion into a church, was hopeand lessly ruined only by a siege twelve hundred years later the Pantheon, having been preserved at first, we must suppose, by peculiar favour of the authorities, owed its subsequent immunity to consecration in the sixth century.^ There is a certain pathos attaching to the fact that the roll of Olympic victors closes in 393 a.d. with the name of an Armenian, after a reputed continuance of more than eleven centuries, while the Pheidian statue of Zeus was carried off to Constantinople a step which shows some sense of its value on the part of the Christians, though we lament that it perished by fire in
Augustine, as
;
476
A.D.
suppression of Paganism, then, was in the first place not universally carried out with equal rigour and in the second place, though indicating the deepest ignorance, and indifference to the value of art, did not mainly arise from the
;
The
same
fanatical repugnance to artistic representation which subsequently revealed itself in the iconoclastic controversy. There was indeed in the fourth century already a rising tide of opposition even to Christian art, but, for the time, the censures recorded only serve to measure the still increasing employ1 " Suavitas." In the clause following those which I quote " suavitas " is replaced by " claritas," the term used 800 years later by Thomas Aquinas. * Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ch. xxviii. See Gibbon's and Milman's notes on the attitude of St. Augustine, from whom conflicting passages are quoted.
Gibbon,
l.c.
GREGORY ON THE USE OF ART.
37
of painting and mosaic on the walls of churches. And plain that the austerity of the later peace of the church ^ was now beginning to assert itself positively within the sphere of art as well as negatively against it for stories of martyrdoms were painted on the walls of basilicas,* and somewhat later even the passion and death of Christ were depicted,* contrary to earlier custom.
it is
;
ment
Along with this change in subjects there grew up, it would seem, the Byzantine manner of representation, gloomy and rigid in itself, but powerful by forcing a new element upon art, which was one day to be assimilated as a new element in beauty. V. But the same restless dualism restless besigniflcaace of icottociaam. cause in principle a monism which in the visible world preferred nature to art, and in art itself preferred the absence of what had hitherto been felt as beauty in both these aspects repeating the thought of Plato- was destined to go still further in Plato's track, and turn its distrust of the visible both against the whole of pictorial art, and In the time against the whole beauty of the visible world. of Gregory the Great (sixth century), the bishop of Marseilles * ordered the removal and destruction of all sacred images within his diocese, in consequence of which violent action Gregory laid down the distinction that it is one thing to worship a. picture, and another to learn from the language of a picture what that is which ought to be worshipped. What those who can read learn by means of writing, the uneducated learn by means of looking at a picture that, therefore, ought not to have been destroyed which had been placed in the churches, not for worship, but solely for instructing the minds of the The same moderate line which Gregory adopted ignorant. was afterwards taken by Charlemagne, and became the rule of the Western Church, which however, we are told, was by no means free from iconoclastic opinion. The didactic value and mission of art has partly been discussed in connection
with Plato and Aristotle, and though in

'
strict
form
it falls
out-
127 above. "Image-worship," and " Mural Decoration," >Kyci. Brit. Paulinus of Nola (d. 431 A.D.) had subjects from Christian history painted as a means
See
p.
* Arts.
of instruction.
As
in the
* Art.
church of San Clemente, at Rome. "Image-worship," Encycl. Brit.
138
substance it affects important issues regarding the comparative position of art in literary and in illiterate ages, and if only for this reason will have to be dealt with below. The actual iconoclastic controversy arose and ran its course within the Eastern Church, covering, with intervals, a period of about 120 years, from 726 to after 842, and it is worth while to note from an aesthetic point of view, the probability that the emperor Leo the I saurian, whose edict against images began it, had been influenced by intercourse with Jews and Arabs.* The high-water mark of the agitation was the Council of Constantinople in 754, attended by 338 bishops, but never recognised as oecumenical, which determined that " Christ in His glorified humanity, though not incorporeal, was yet exalted above all the limits and defects of a sensuous nature, too exalted therefore to be figured by human art in an earthly material after the analogy of any other human body," and pronounced anathema on all who attempted to express by visible colours the form of the Logos in His incarnation, and on all who delineate dumb and lifeless figures of the saints, which could never serve any profitable end.* And although the Eastern Church after 842 returned to a theoretical position much like that of Gregory and Charlemagne, yet the Byzantine manner of painting maintained itself in Italy till the twelfth century, and survives in Athos till the present day, under the influence, it would seem, of a distinctly ascetic theory and code of rules.' In this dispute we see yet another phase of the shifting dualism between the spirit and the flesh. Reinforced by the extra-mundane monotheism of Jews and Mahometans, the faith in a spiritual order now turns decisively, as in Plato, against all sensuous presentations as essentially inadequate to that order and attains the result of recording a protest, like that of Plato, that in so far as to represent means to copy something that can be copied, so far the spiritual, as such.
side aesthetic, yet in
;
on some pictures of Titian, which he had ordered and refused to accept "Your scandalous pictures stand quite out from the canvas ; they are as bad as statues." Gibbon, ch. 49 note. " Images," it seems, down to the ninth century, mean pictures and mosaics. Sculptures are only mentioned in the ninth century and later.
:
Gibbon, ch. 49. Art. " Image-worship," Ernycl. Brit. 8 Cf. the alleged remark of a Greek monk
1
PRACTICAL TRUTH OF THE DECISION.
139
cannot be represented in a sensuous form. The difference is that now the conception of symbolism is in the air, and the whole problem is therefore on the level to which Plato raised it, and not on that from which he started. The " other " or spiritual world of which he was concerned to demonstrate the reality, is now (however crudely apprehended) the one object of faith to the popular mind and the deceitfulness of sensuous forms is no longer the conclusion of the solitary thinker, but the premiss fanatically urged by a section of the common crowd. Therefore the weight of the problem is thrown in a new direction not towards exalting the value of the " other " world, but towards re-establishing or maintaining its cohesion with this. And though Gregory the Great was indifferent to
; ;
and Charlemagne could hardly write, yet the logic of facts and the experience of ages drove them into a solution which Plato, just because he helped to make it possible, only recognised when at his very best. For the position of these authorities, who could not be expected to talk the language of philosophy, and who were conditioned in their policy by all sorts of passions and necessities affecting the Church of their respective times which after all were necessities of human know that life may fairly be paraphrased thus : " pictures cannot be copies of an essence which is inaccessible to sensuous perception, and therefore they are not to be worshipped ; ^ but they can teach, because visible things can have a meaning ; and therefore pictures are not to be rejected, but are to be retained as means of instruction and as aids to memory." In aesthetic philosophy such a view is incorrect, or But the effect of art is not limited by incorrectly formulated. the grounds which the powers that be allege for permitting it to exist, and in the widest historical sense, though not in the strict language of philosophy, there is no doubt whatever that art is the instructress of peoples. vi. It was in the ninth century, just about the ThosyBtemof scotus Erigena. tjjng ^t which the controversy regarding pictorial art in sacred buildings was decided both in the East and the West, that a really considerable thinker formulated mediaeval ideas in a complete system, and, as a part of it, laid down the The position of this place and nature of material beauty.
learning,
We
\
'
'
;
'
" Es
hilft riichts,
unsere Knie beugen wir doch nicht mehr." Hegel, AesiA.
i.
132, describing the inevitable
modem
distinction
between
art
and religion.
140
philosopher, Scotus Erigena, from whom I have already^ quote a typical statement of mediaeval symbolism, is one of the cir cumstances that make it hard to know precisely where we ar are apt to think of them a to look for the Dark Ages. a prolonged period, ending with the Renaissance, in whicl
We
disputants, ignorant alike of science and of real philosophy wrangled about logical forms that were in truth subordinati But we saw above that our concep to theological doctrines. tion of the Renaissance is leading us to trace it ever furthe
back
and on the other hand the modern estimate of Erigen;
tends to throw the origin of Scholasticism proper somewha Scholasticism proper, then, is in fac later than his lifetime. the beginning of the end, and coincides with the two or thre< centuries of definite intellectual advance that preceded the lift of Dante, assuming that we refuse to attach importance to ii But if Scholasticism the conscious adjustmem after his day. of relations between philosophy and theology marked the close of the Dark Ages, the speculation of Erigena, continuous with that of Greek as well as Latin writers, apparently was before their beginning, in which case the long tract of obscurity, that represents them to the popular imagination, had really nc existence, and the attributes of the middle age must be stated with greater care and sympathy. To begin with, Erigena was a Greek scholar the last, I suppose, in the West before the time of Roger Bacon (twelfth century). He writes much in the sense of St. Augustine, but he also translated from the Greek the writings of the pseudoDionysius, and uses long quotations, rendered into Latin from Maximus (seventh century). Dionysius, thus Latinised, affected the opinions of Aquinas and so the ideas of Plotinus, with which Dionysius was saturated, form a continuous strand throughout the thought of the greatest mediaeval teachers. And again, Erigena was a philosopher true philosophy and true theology were for him coincident, not in the sense of subordinating either to the other, but in the sense that truth His general views do not strictly concern agrees with truth. us here but to show that a writer in the age of faith, whose use of fact and of analogy is absolutely childish, may yet be very rational in his leading thoughts upon central questions, it is worth while to mention that he maintained the Eucharist
Page 131 above.
TRUE AND FALSE BEAUTY.

;
141
to be merely a symbolical and commemorative rite treated the Mosaic account of the creation as purely allegorical, and ascribed to hell no local existence, but regarded it as an inner
state of the will.^
not the opportunity, and I have not the ability, to problem involved in the mixture of reason and but I may be folly presented to us by the age of faith allowed to point out that in the division of labour, which the course of history enforces, it fell upon the middle age to make the first sketch-plan of a new life, and teach its use to illiteand it is natural that attention could not be rate peoples given to accuracy of details till after the main bearings had been roughly set down. Neither the philosophy of the great Greek classics nor the wide survey of methodic natural science would have met fairly and squarely the problems and which pressed upon Augustine, Erigena, or Dante if all had happened in its due order, and therefore it seems as as if the instruments which did accomplish the task were the only ones which could have done so. In aesthetic, Erigena does not seem to make any definite advance of detail upon Augustine, and even falls back in comparison with him by a less vivid appreciation of the problem His strength, as is natural for a systematic philoof ugliness. sopher, is rather i discriminating the relations which respectively constitute the true and false beauty of the visible world, as depending upon the position which the human mindi may assign it with reference to the invisible world. He discusses this question in connection with the story of the " tree of Fall, following Maximus in his interpretation of the exposition says,* This, the knowledge of good and evil." stands for the nature of visible things, which, if apprehended in their "reasons"' or significance gives the knowledge of good, if taken as the object of desire gives the knowledge of The " woman " stands for sense, the evil that brings death. " man " for reason. God* made the visible creation in order
This
is
treat the vast
that through it, as through the invisible. His praise might be notwkai He is, but that multiplied, and He might be known, all creation both visible and inis the single author of
He
Prof. Adamson, art. " Erigena," in Encyci. Brit. Erigena, Works, Floss' ed., p. 842. * Rationes, cf. JPIotinus' Xoyoi. * lb., 843 B.
1
142
visible.
And therefore [in the story of the Fall] God forbad( nature to take delight in the visible creation before i (human nature) arrived at the perfection of wisdom in whicl: being made one with God (deificata), it might be able to converse with God about the significance of visible things. Noi would the woman, that is the fleshly perception, be able to attract the man, that is the intellect, ^ to take delight in the material creation externally considered (i.e. not in its significance), ii he purposed to have the knowledge of the Creator before the knowledge of the created. Therefore it was the order laid down by the divine law, ^rj^ to learn of the Creator and His unspeakable beauty, and then to regard the creation in a significant or spiritual sense, conforming to the inclinations of the intelligence, and to interpret the whole of its beauty, whether it exist inwardly in significance or outwardly in sensible forms, as showing forth the praise of the Creator. " It^ is not therefore the creation that is bad, nor the knowledge of it, but the perverse impulse of the reasonable mind, which abandons the contemplation of its author and turns with lustful and illicit appetite to the love of sensible matter." And following Gregory' of Nyssa, he identifies the ugly with matter that has no form or the wrong form that is, once more, that is not apprehended or desired in its true relation to the will of God. From the point of view of the universe, I imagine, there is according to Erigena's conception no real
human
;
ugliness.
in him no special philosophy of fine art the disbetween the theoretical and the non-theoretical senses is indeed touched upon,* but is rather minimised than accented and the general doctrine of beauty is exceedingly defective on the side of the distinction between beauty and knowledge. Nevertheless we have here a two-edged idea of great im;
We find
tinction
In Erigena crowns the ascetic movement which had shown itself in iconoclastic opinion, by a sweeping condemnation of the whole charm of the visible world, including both art and nature, except on a certain definite condition. Thus on the one side the antagonism of sense and spirit finds a thoroughgoing representative in him. But in the second place, the condition which he lays down,
the
first place,
1
portance in the history of the aesthetic consciousness.
Animum.
2 lb.,
844 D.
3 /^.^
789-90.
* lb., 854.
BEAUTY
Atj
MEANING.
I43
as essential to real beauty, that the visible creation shall be apprehended as a revelation of the glory of God, and therefore apart from the relation of sensuous desire, appears to me to have more than a rhetorical value. It implies no doubt a disinterested sense of the real teleology in man and nature, and therefore approximates technically to Kant's definition, " teleology without an end." And moreover it applies this sense of rationality to the whole world through and through, not merely to art nor to the choicer parts of nature thus manifesting that conviction of universal significance which lies at the root both of modern science and of modern art. If we look back to Plato and Aristotle, we shall see that the mediseval " pulchritudo," taken as something co-extensive with the visible universe considered as the work of God which He has pronounced to be good, has become a far more familiar working conception and factor in opinion than was their koKov in this particular application to the beauty of material things. And the transition from imitation to symbolism immensely Imitation is only a rule of facilitated this generalisation. art, and prima facie can make nothing beautiful which is not given as beautiful. Symbolism is a mode of interpretation and with all its enormous risks of arbitrariness, has the one advantage of absolute universality. If all that has a meaning may be beautiful, then there is nothing in which we may not chance to detect an element of beauty. It is easy to see how hopeful is such an idea, and how rich a prospect it opens, in comparison with the notion of the beautiful as finally and unalterably given to perception.
;
antagonism between "this" world and the "other" takes its sharpest form for Christians in 1000 AJ). .^ anticipations of the second coming; and it is said^ that in the tenth century these assumed so definite a reference to the year looo a.d. (iooo years from the Incarnation) as to give a decided check to the erection of great buildSuch a revival of the belief in the short-livedness of ings. the whole visible frame of things forms an appropriate climax to the movement which began with a distrust of formative art, and ended with a condemnation, conditional in theory, but probably unconditioinal in practice, of material beauty as a whole.
Antid atioa of End of World
'^"-
"^"^^
Encyd.
Brit., axis.
"Architecture."
"Millennium." "Illumination."
144
After the year looo, whether owing to relief from the expectation of the end, or to the incipient organisation and national life of Europe, the practice of building was resumed with greater zeal than ever, and, as if a crisis had been passed, even the art of sculpture though especially hateful to the ascetic spirit began to make headway in conjunction with
architecture.
It does not seem, however, that either beauty in general or fine art in particular received theoretical consideration from find in Abelard's hymns^ the th*? earlier scholastics.
We
familiar sentiment that nature
is
above
art,
and he sums up
the discussion, whether the heathen poets should be read by Christians, unfavourably to the poets,'' relying in part on the example of Plato. His life, and the vernacular love-songs he wrote, must have had an influence greatly opposed to his teaching, which was probably determined by a revulsion of feeling almost analogous to that of St. Augustine on his conversion.
viii. St. Francis of Assisi (i 182-1226) must be ^jjg modem Mind mentioned here, not only as the earliest Italian In St. FJancis. p^gj^ jj^ virtue of the Cantico delle Creature, but on account of the peculiar qualities exhibited in his life and character. No more striking representation of the modern mind in contrast with the antique, no more felicitous union of the complementary and contrasted attributes which imply each other in the logic of evolution, could be invented by the his-
' Abelard lived 1079-1142. For the hymns see Cousin's edition of the Works, I. 300. Some verses from a hymn on the Creation are worth quoting. The beginning of rhyme is noteworthy, and so is the mixture of Horatian
and Christian sentiment.

Impensis, dives, nimiis
Domum
casuram construis
Falso sole pingis testudinem Falsis stellis in coeli speciem.
In veri cceli camera Pauper jacit pulcherrima Vero sole, veris sideribus Istam illi depinxit Dominus.
Opus magis eximium Est naturae qUam hominum Quod nee labor nee sumptus prseparat Nee vetustas solvendo dissipat
*
Works,
2.
442.
CHARACTER OF
ST.
FRANCIS.
145
torian of philosophy to illustrate his argument. said, in entering upon the post-classical time of decadence, that the modern mind in comparison with the ancient is a divided mind. It is not distinguished by inclusion within one side of an antithesis as against the other, but by presenting both sides of the antithesis, whether reconciled or not, in a form
We
which
is
at first sight that of the
most trenchant antagonism.
very height of mystical asceticism, that is, technically speaking, the approach to God by irrational contemplation in withdrawal from the actual world. The story of the stigmata clearly points to habitual self-concentration of this kind. But, secondly, there is ascribed to him by common consent an extraordinary sympathy with nature, both animate and inanimate. The address to " Brother Sun " is strictly and
in St. Francis the
First, then,
we observe
The self-concentrated modern to nature, as aesthetic theory has pointed out in various formulse, just because it finds in itself so deep
logically Christian in spirit.
mind turns hungrily

a need.
And thirdly, in the mind cf this mystical ascetic and sympathetic lover of nature there was an innate capacity for one
great form of reasonable work for organisation and the management of men. It is needless to enlarge on this characteristic in the founder of the Franciscan order. Even in so great a character as that of St. Francis these varied tendencies impress us with a sense of mystery and contradiction. They do not display themselves in the same action, and have an external appearance of being rather vicissitudes of life than revelations of a single purpose. They are much less easily explicable than the attributes of the poet who is a citizen poet, or the hero who is a citizen hero, or the And in the lesser philosopher who is a citizen philosopher. moderns they do in fact to some degree fall apart, as they did the Stoic, the Epiin the sects and men of the decadence, But curean, the Neo-Platonist, the amatory or pastoral poet. yet they have an underlying connection, and in all their rich and apparently lawless profusion are essential attributes of the modern mind. Thus, for example, the self-concentration of St. Francis in his devotional raptures* cannot have indicated a mind abstracted or detached from organic reason and
It will
trances of
be remembered some kind.
that Socrates
is
said to have
been subject to
146
reality,
but only an element of abstraction and detachment which is the outward aspect of possession by profound and complex ideas. Especially this is the case, when, in the intervals of action, ideas fall into shapes of feeling prescribed by tradition. The depth of the intelligence is correlative and not antagonistic to its breadth, and the reason which grapples most energetically and sympathetically with things outside, both needs, and for that very reason possesses, the profoundThe meditations of the mere est self-concentration within. recluse are generally shallow meditations.
Ideas of St. day, Thomas A<iina8.jjjgj.^j.y
active and brilliant in his to posterity by other than achievements, was the greatest of Schoolmen, the Dominican Thomas of Aquino. Born in 1227, the year after the death of St. Francis, he lived on the public stage as an ardent controversialist in the interest of his order
Theasthetio
^^-
^^ much
less
less
though
known
liberty of teaching, as a lecturer in Paris, Rome, and Bologna, and as the adviser of king and pope on questions of and closed his amazingly laborious ecclesiastical management career at the age of forty-seven, cis St. Francis at the age of fortyfour. I insist upon these biographical details because it appears to me that only by realising the energy of such brief and versatile lives are we enabled, as also in the history of Abelard, It to place our finger on the quickening pulse of the time. might be worth while even to raise the question whether the weakness of mediaeval science and philosophy was not connected rather with excess of practice than with excess of theory. What we justly stigmatise as the subordination of philosophy to theology is, in other words, a subordination of science to a formulated conception of human welfare, with a strictly mundane if also with a transcendental side. The question is not unimportant, for it indicates that the essence of scholasticism is present, not wherever there is metaphysic, but wherever the spirit of truth is subordinated to any preconceived practical intent, whether mundane or extra-mundane. Some such considerations as these force themselves upon us, however much we allow for the dissociation of men's
and of
practice from their opinions, when we contrast the busy public lives of Abelard in his greatness, or of Anselm, of
St.
Newton or Locke or
1
Francis or St. Thomas, with the cloistered industry of Spinoza.^

do not think
that a comparison even with Descartes
and Leibnitz, how-
COLOUR AND SYMMETRY AGAIN.
47
The Summa Theologica, which was to bring to a focus, as we should say, the bearings of all knowledge upon man's
highest interests, was the antitype in science of St. Thomas' ideas of political and ecclesiastical unity. In this Summa the nature of beauty is more than once referred to.^ The following points may be noted in accordance with the scheme previously adopted. ^' '^^^ substantive account of beauty is drawn symbousm through the pseudo-Dionysius (translated, it will be remembered, by Scotus Erigena) from the tradition which was already a tradition in the time of Plotinus, and was criticised by him as inadequate. The precise correspondence of
terms between St. Thomas, in a passage" where he cites chapter and verse from Dionysius for his view, and Augustine, Plotinus, and Xenophon ' the terms are " Claritas et de-
and symmetry) =x/>A' . no reasonable doubt that this is so. In another place * " Integritas sive perfectio" is added as a third element of beauty to " Debita proportio sive consonantia" and " Claritas But this addition makes no i.e., color nitidus." difference of principle, only insisting from the side of the whole on the same condition which " debita proportio " imposes upon all the parts. As in Plotinus, the ultimate ground of attraction in beauty is the affinity, revealed in symmetry, between the percipient and the perceived. Although St.
orvfjifjLeTpia
bita proportio " (brightness of colour
leaves
Thomas makes the senses the direct bearers of this affinity " The senses are charmed with things duly proportioned, as
" yet analogous to themselves ('Sicut in sibi similibus ^) he clearly adopts the derivation of all beauty from God, and begives, like Plotinus, the first rank to the sense of sight
'
''
cause of
its affinity
to the intellect.
ever prominent in the world these great men were, really invalidates this Leibnitz was led by his practical interests to write a Systema suggestion. Even Francis Theologicum in the interest of Catholic-Protestant reunion. Bacon has the scholastic attribute that his logic is moulded rather by a final cause in a human need than by real conditions in the nature of the subject
matter.
^
See Preface.
2 *
Summa
Summa,
I.e.
TheoL, 2 pars 2 partis, q. 145,

i pars, q.
art. 2.
See pp. 45, 117 supra.

39, art. 8.
lb., I pars, q. 5, art. 4.
*
6
*
7
note 2 above.
contra, gentes, bk. 3, ch. 53.
Summa
148
Thus we may conclude that symmetry is beautiful, for him as for his predecessors, because symbolic of reason and but he does not, any more than they, follow Plotidivinity nus in the demand for life and expression as something more
;
than symmetry.
lays it down that in beauty The meaning of desire is quiet, or is quieted. ambiguous, for desire may be quieted by this, which is per se being satiated, seems to be made plain by the inference drawn from it, that the beautiful is the concern of the specially "cognitive" senses of sight and hearing ;' and more generally,
iEstuetic Interest,
2.
St.
Thomas
I think that beauty has to do with the cognitive power. ^ that this does not indicate a confusion between beauty and knowledge, but only a distinction between perception and
appetite.
between the aesthetic and we do not speak of beautiful taken on the ground that sight and hearis tastes or smells," ing are more the instruments of reason and more perceptive This seems to mean, in their character than taste or smell. first, that the semblance is in them more separable from the and, secondly, that they are reality which arouses desire That there is capable of apprehending a structural whole. no confusion between beauty and knowledge is shown by the clear contrast laid down between material and spiritual beauty, the latter being explained as something named by analogy from the characteristics of sensible beauty. The primacy assigned to sight as nearer to intellect rests no doubt on the same general grounds which have been In estimating it we must bear in mind analysed above.* that the great romantic art of music, as we know it, had not then arisen, while we all the more respect the prophetic insight of Plato and Aristotle, who in great measure understood the extraordinary power of sound. Thus it appears that the Neo-Platonic tradition was the principal element in the intellectual aesthetic of the middle
Concrete criticum.
distinction " unsesthetic senses

3-
The
Though a part of Plotinus' concrete application was yet the general scheme of his view was in conformity with the Christian consciousness, which, partly by inheritance and partly by origination, made an analogous conviction its
age.
lost,
I
pars 2 partis,
q. 27, art. i.
'^
pars, q. 5, art. 4.
p. 117.
THE BEAUTY OF THE UNIVERSE.
49
own
peculiar attribute. That beauty is the revelation of reason in sensuous shape, that its fascination consists in its affinity with mind, and that consequently the entire sensible universe, as a symbol of the Divine reason, must be beautiful to the eye that can see it in relation to its Creator, all this had sunk deep into Christian sentiment, and is familiar to us both in profound and in shallow readings of the argument from design. Unquestionably, the middle age, throughout its long development, was inspired by this conviction, unconscious in its art which was an achievement, but conscious in its theory which was a postulate. Only there remained, and remains, a certain half-heartedness in theoretical dealing with the phenomena of apparent From the place of unreason, for aesthetic as for theology. the grotesque and the ascetic, the mysterious and the sublime, in Gothic architecture and Byzantine painting, we should infer the boldest and most concrete practical monism, or acceptance of all that is as at least a part of beauty. But, on the other hand, from the total absence, so far as we have seen, of theoretical study directed to the concrete analysis of austere or recondite beauty in nature or in art, we should infer that for mediaeval theory the beauty of the universe was rather an abstraction, to be justified in detail by a later age, than an indication of genuine sympathy with the romantic consciousness.
however, the conception of universal beauty at least, and by St. Augustine was felt to capable of including real or apparent contradiction in some be
For all was there

degree.
that,
in
name
Thus, by the side of a comprehensive and concrete artistic practice there had come down and been accepted a theory more comprehensive still, as including external nature, but and when the aesthetic conbare of detailed application sciousness of the middle age had passed, not indeed from death to a second birth, but from birth and infancy to
;
maturity and articulate utterance, then aesthetic theory was absorbed into artistic practice, which filled it at last with adequate content, destined one day to become in turn the
material of
Thomas, and speaks with his voice, both in the formal theory of beauty, and in Whether he the meaning which he ascribes to the universe.
St.
more fruitful theory. Dante was born in the lifetime of
150
his great poem was beautiful according to his own definition of beauty can hardly be judged but if not, it would none the less be true that he was actively inspired by that conception of universal beauty whidi for the mere thinker had probably been little more than a phrase or a dream. This wide conception, explicit in mediaeval faith, as implicit in mediaeval workmanship, was represented in the higher imaginative forms by Dante and his fellow artists, and in being realized was carried far beyond all previous intellectual ideas of beauty, and very probably beyond theoretical recognition on the part of those who
would himself have said that

;
realized
it.
CHAPTER
VII.
A COMPARISON OF DANTE AND SHAKESPEARE IN RESPECT OF SOME FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS.
The very strict limitations under which the pregent chapter must be written may seem likely to annihilate its interest, but will really, I hope, preserve it from intolerable tediousness for any writer would be tedious, I imagine, who, not being qualified by a life-long study of fine
Limits of the
subjecta.
.
art, and being guided only by ordinary cultivated opinion, should wander over the immense field of the Renaissance in search of an aesthetic moral.
I propose, therefore, in the first place, to confine consideration, except in mere passing remarks, to the two great poets who appear respectively to open and to close the age of
my
the
new
birth,
when we
consider
it
not as a fresh departure in
and science, but as the flowering time of a beauty that had long been in the making. It will be possible to point out in these two typical cases some important features of the great movement in its course and issue.
letters
And in the second place it would, I should suppose, be unendurable that any ordinary writer should throw out, so to speak, in passing, his general appreciations of these two suns of literature, upon whose splendours the greatest critics and philosophers of the modern world have expended their most
,
industrious study. But under the strict limitations which I propose to adopt there is something definite to be said which is not wholly without value. I may illustrate my meaning by reference to the exploded idea that great artists are guided in production by aesthetic recipes or prescriptions. If it were so, what could be of greater historical interest than to disentangle from their works and to compare with one another the abstract schemes according to which these works were created And although no such formulae exist, yet undoubtedly there is in every work of art an element of distinct intention, subject moreover, like all our conscious purposes, to limits perfectly obvious to an onlooker though hidden from the author him.''
161
152
self, with regard to the species of art to which it is to belong, the sort of subject about which it is to treat, and the sort of point or significance which it is to possess. Such an element of formal purpose is especially inevitable in the case of modern artists who live in an atmosphere of reflection, and among them more particularly in the case of poets, whose imagination is forced to be conversant with explicit language and articulate ideas. It is to this element of formal intention, with its most obvious limits as regards subject and treatment, that I intend to restrict myself in comparing Dante and Shakespeare. In itself, it is in each case a fact no less positive than that Turner painted landscapes, and Reynolds portraits, or that Goethe drew from Marlowe the connection of Helena with Faustus. It is therefore the legitimate prey of the historian, who is attempting to trace the extent and position of the spheres successively occupied by the beautiful in the intellectual system. For the sense and modesty of his interpretation he, of
course, remains responsible.

The Selection of
Arustio Form by the two Poets,
Fi^st, then, there is a notable contrast in the selection of artistic form by Dante and by Shake-
^p^^^.^
^^^
..
j^ ^j^^ selection of artistic
form
"
Vergil, and apparently well acquainted with Latin poetry in general, and charged, moreover, in every fibre of his being with respect for intellectual authority, nevertheless devised a totally new species of poetic art, coming under no possible category in the ac-
and not "in the artistic form selected." " Shakespeare was a dramatist, and then " ? But this is not quite the point. is that Dante, though a worshipper of
For it might be replied, Dante was not what

;
The remarkable
point
cepted classification with which he was perfectly familiar.^ He himself called his great work a Comedy first because it begins grimly and ends pleasandy and secondly, because it is written in the vernacular, in which even women converse, and therefore must be regarded as, in a humble style, contrasted with that of tragedy.* But we need not say that it is not a comedy for it is not even a drama, having neither dramatic form nor dramatic unity. Nor can it seriously be taken as an epic,* for the in; ;
Letter to Can Grande. Dante's Works, ed Fraticelli. As Mr. O. Browning seems to class it, ficyc/. Brit,
3.
art.
508
ff.
" Dante.''
for
the whole of this question Schelling's brilliant essay " Philosophischer Beziehung," Werke, 5, 153.
Cf.
iii
Ueber Dante
INDIVIDUALITY IN THE TWO POETS.
53
cidents are not in any normal sense parts within a single action there is in fact no action, and thus once more, the poem
;
cannot be called a romance. To compare it to a didactic poem would plainly be futile and although it contains lyrical elements, yet nothing so heavily burdened with plastic and historical content could conceivably be called a lyrical poem. And yet it is anything but formless. From the scheme of the versification to the order of the argument, all is symmetrically planned and so symmetrically that we should certainly call it pedantic were not its definiteness simply an attribute of perhaps the most vivid imagination that ever expressed itself in poetry. The Divine Comedy, then, is absolutely unique in form.
; ;
By setting the traditional classification at defiance it raised, at the outset of modern art, the fundamental aesthetic problem whether art-species are permanent. All this significance is lost if we go about in a half-hearted way to effect an approximation between it and an epic or a tragedy. And being unique, it is a very type of individuality. It is, says Fraticelli, " a political, historical, and ethical picture of the thirteenth century."^ Although it is such a picture, it yet has its central interest in the fate of souls, and more particularly in that of the poet's soul. Nothing could be more universal, and nothing It is could be more individual, nothing even more personal. the climax of the long movement which we have attempted to trace, in which the individual spirit has deepened into a universe within, because it has widened into oneness with the universe without. When we turn to Shakespeare, we find that in the form of art this unique and personal individuality is to some The comparatively slow development of extent toned down. English genius, together with the local remoteness which was in part its cause, had apparently enabled our great poet to take suggestions from the later or pseudo-classical Renaissance, without, however, being subdued by it into the formalism which elsewhere was rapidly setting in during his lifetime. He is aware of the classical tradition, and takes from it that which he needs. The sixteenth century in England had been The "dramatic full of critical dispute and poetical experiments. unities " of time and even of place were maintained by one
^ Fraticelli's edition, Introduction.
154
party with an absoluteness which we think unreasonable, and know to be un- Aristotelian. But for this there may have been a comparative justification if, as Sidney alleges, the common romantic dramas of his day were even more careless of the contradictions which they forced upon the audience than the play of Ferrex and Porrex (1561), in which incidents that would occupy several hours begin and end while a single Sidney however speech is being delivered on the stage.* evidently thought that not merely reason, but tradition and the custom of the ancients, followed, as he tells us, by the modern Italians, were decisive arguments on behalf of stricter form.^ The " mungrell Tragy-comedie " vexes him greatly;
See Sidney's Apologie for Foetrie, circ. 1580. Shuckburgh's ed. p. 51 ff. notes. Ferrex and Forrex is the play known as Gorboduc, in tlie style of Seneca. Sidney only refers to Aristotle as enjoining the restriction of time to one day, which is correct except for the absoluteness he lends to the " precept." The unity of " place " he lays down, but does not ascribe to Aristotle. ^ The whole passage is so picturesque, and so exactly illustrates the scene on which Shakespeare was just about to appear, that I venture to quote it in extenso. Shuckburgh's ed. pp. 51-54.
1
and
"Our Tragedies, and Comedies (not without cause cried out against) observing rules neyther of honest civilitie nor of skilfull Poetrie, excepting Gorboduck (againe, I say, of those that I have seene), which notwithstanding, as it is full of stately speeches and well-sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile, and as full of notable moralitie, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtayne the very end of Poesie ; yet in troth it is very defections in the circumstances : which greeveth me, because it might not remaine as an exact model of all Tragedies. For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporall actions. For where the stage should alwaies represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotles precept and common reason, but one day there is both many dayes, and many places, inartificially imagined. But if it be so in Gorboduck, how much more in al the rest ? where you shal have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other underkingdoms; that the Player, when he commeth in, must ever begin with telling where he is ; or els, the tale wil not be conceived. Now ye shall have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeve the stage to be a Garden. By and by, we heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, and then wee are to blame, if we accept it not for a Rock. Upon the backe of that, comes out a hidious Monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bounde to take it for a Cave. While in the mean-time, two Armies flye in, represented with foure swords and bucklers, and then what harde heart will not receive it for a pitched fielde ? " Now, of time they are much more liberall. For ordinary it is that two young Princes fall in love after many traverces, she is got with childe, delivered of a faire boy ; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child, and all this in two hours' space : which how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and Arte hath taught, and all auncient
: :
SHAKESPEARE S FORM.
but
55
we can hardly be sure whether his censure would have applied to Shakespeare's humour in tragedies, for Shakespeare himself objected in terms not unlike Sidney's, to the officious interference of the clowns in serious passages. Translations from Seneca and an adaptation of the PkoenisscB of Euripides were succeeded on the stage by the wild imaginations of Marlowe and to Ben Jonson and Shakespeare the whole conflict of forms and tendencies was full of instruction and suggestion.' Coming upon the arena thus prepared for him, Shakespeare He accepts the adopts a distinctly traditional dramatic form.
;
examples
in.
justified
Yet
wil
and at this day, the ordinary Players in some bring in an example of Eunuchus in
:
Italic wil
not erre Terence, that con-
taineth matter of two dayes, yet far short of twenty yeeres. True it is, and so was it to be played in two dales, and so fitted to the time it set forth. And though Plautus hath in one place done amisse, let us hit with him, and not
how then shall we set forth a story, which containeth both places and many times ? And doe they not knowe, that a Tragedie is tied to the lawes of Poesie, and not of Historie ? not bound to follow the storie, but having liberty, either to faine a quite newe matter, or to frame the Againe, many things may be told history to the most tragicall conveniencie. which cannot be shewed, if they knowe the difference betwixt reporting and As for example, I may speake (though I am heere) of Peru, representing. and in speech digresse from that to the description of Calicut: but in action, I cannot represent it without Pacolets horse : and so was the manner the Auncients tooke, by some Nuncius to recount thinges done in former time, or
misse with him. " But they wil say,
many
Tragy-comedies, as Plautus hath Amphitrio. But if we marke them well, we shall find that they never, or very daintily, match Horn-pypes and Funeralls. So falleth it out, that, having indeed no right Comedy, in that comicall part of our Tragedy we have nothing but scurrility, unwoorthy of any chast eares or some extrearae shew of doltishness, indeed fit to lift up a loude laughter and nothing els where the whole tract of a Comedy shoulde be full of delight, as the Tragedy shoulde be still maintained in a well raised admiration." Cf. Ben Jonson, Prologue to Every Man out of his Humour, 1599, where a reasonable inference is drawn from the fact that dramatic form has had a historical development, to the conclusion that all precepts concerning it are Cf. subject to modification in accordance with felt needs that may emerge. also Polonius in Hamlet, " The best actors in the world," etc.
: :
other place. " But beside these grosse absurdities, how all theyr Playes be neither right Tragedies, nor right Comedies mingling Kings and Clownes, not because the matter so carrieth it but thrust in Clownes by head and shoulders, to play a part in maiesticall matters, with neither decencie nor discretion. So as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by I know Apuleius did some-what their mungrell Tragy-comedie obtained. so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in one moment and I knowe, the Auncients have one or two examples of
:
156
complicated organic structure of Latin comedy, with its five He is more careful than his rude acts and separate scenes. predecessors to motive or excuse his violation of the unities. He observes, except in the histories, with hardly any deviation, the sharp distinction between tragedy and comedy which Dante applied so strangely.^ That is to say, in the plays of which the catastrophe is not tragic, the happy ending or reconciliation is absolutely complete, and no irrevocable misCloten in Cymoefortune befalls any character in the play. line, and Antigonus in the Winters Tale, are the only exceptions to this rule outside the historical dramas, which are the continuance of a pre-Shakespearian and romantic form of play. By the great place he gives to histories, therefore, he so far Moredefies the traditional classification of dramatic form. over he refuses to employ the choruses, to observe the unities, or to push the distinction between tragedy and comedy so far as to dissociate the former from the humour that belongs to every complete representation of life. And in thus accepting a dramatic form he has accepted Perhaps in one wellits freedom from personal reference. known passage there is some playful malice against an old enemy. Otherwise, as is only too clear to us, there is no Even the story of the sonnets self-betrayal in Shakespeare. has practically to be accepted in its universal meaning. Its personal reference, whether ascertainable or not, is not woven into the texture of the poems. What a contrast with
Dante
Thus in Shakespeare's poetic form the later or classical Renaissance is modifying the earlier creative or romantic Renaissance. And in this he differs from Dante, whose form is unique, individual, even personal. 3' With regard to subject-matter and kind of The Kind of Bignifloance aimed significance a parallel contrast may be noted. yeac Dante's subject-matter is nominally the other world. However profoundly he may conceive the unity of the soul's fate after death with its terrestrial action and character, this primary peculiarity colours his whole artistic scheme. Unity and symmetry of parts in the whole, which to him, as
* " tragic beginning and a comic ending " seems to have been a stock mediaeval phrase for " a good beginning and a happy ending." See Dante to
Can Grande,
sect. 10.
ALLEGORY IN DANTE.
^57
to the earlier mediaeval writers, constituted beauty/ is no doubt the ultimate burden of his thought, but the vehicle of its expression is a dualism. In this it represents the medieval or early modern mind whose utterance it was. The same fate had befallen the kingdom of heaven that befel Plato's ideas. The very principle of unity itself was hardened into something material, at all events into something sensuous, and was set in opposition over against that of which it was meant to be the unity, as " another " world against "this." Such a course of thought was inevitable. Reality, for early ages, must mean material reality, and the spiritual world could not become an object of popular belief except as a non-terrestrial abiding-
This first dualism between our world of images and the other world of images, forms the content of Dante but beside and behind it there is also another, the dualism of the entire universe of sense-images over against its spiritual or moral meaning. This dualism within a dualism is never wholly absent from views to which heaven and hell are the necessary complement of earth. And thus the visions of Dante's art were in the first place fantastic, being dislocated from their human context, and thrown into a shape in accordance with the imagination of a world beyond the grave and secondly they were consciously and intentionally allegorical or symbolical. He accepted the four concurrent senses acknowledged by mediaeval canons of interpretation,^ as illustrated by himself in the following paragraph from his letter to Can Grande, (c.7.). "In order to a clear understanding of what I am about to say, you must know that the sense of this work [The Commedia] is not simple; rather the work might be called 'of many senses.' For there is one sense which is got from the letter, and another which is got from the things signified by the letter ; and the former is called literal, the latter allegorical or mystiThis mode of treatment, for the better understanding of cal. When the case of these verses it, may be considered in Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from among
place.
; ; : '
Paradiso, i. 103 ; " Le cose tutte quante Hann' ordine tra loro ; e questo fe forma, Che r universo a Die fa somigliante." " Litera gesta docet : quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas ; quid sj>eres anagogia." Fraticdli.
Convito,
ii.
cf.
158
a Strange people, Judah was His sanctification [Vulgate] and For if we look at the letter alone, Israel His dominion.^ there is signified to us the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses if at the allegory, our redemption by Christ if at the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of grace; of the holy soul if at the anagogic [elevating sense], the exodus liberty of eternal glory. from the bondage of corruption to the And although these mystic senses are called by different names, yet generally they may all be called allegorical, seeing For that they are different from the literal or historical. so from the Greek aXXoi'o?, which means allegoria is called in Latin alienum or diversum.' Are these two elements, then, the fantastic element resting upon the subordination of this world to the next, and the allegorical and abstract element resting on the subordination of all perceptible forms to a whole hierarchy of spiritual or ethical are these what is demanded by a theory which interpretations, gives the weight we have persistently claimed to creative imagination and spiritual symbolism in the analysis of beauty ? Certainly they do not impress us in this way, when thus set out in abstract language, for, to mention no other objection, it would seem that thus taken anything could be made to mean anything, so that all reality and definiteness in the perception If beauty indeed lies in symof beauty would be destroyed. bolic meaning, and if symbolic meaning is utterly arbitrary, then we ask with Fra Lippo Lippi
; ; ' '
'
'
'
"
Why
for this
skull and bones, of art at all ? Two bits of wood nailed crosswise, or, what's best, bell to chime the hours with, does as well."
What need
I hope that the distinction which solves this paradox will become clear of itself, through the very contrast which we are now engaged in considering. But with reference to Dante and mysticism in general, I must recall the principle which I have insisted on more than once before,^ namely that the
aesthetic value of mysticism, like the scientific value of alchemy,
man is not a lies not in its precepts but in its practice. great artist because he is prepared to see in everything, in a beautiful woman, in a classical poet, in a wood or a mountain.
Quoted
in Purgatorio,
ii.
46.
Ch. 2 and ch. 6 supra.
SOUND IN DANTE.
59
or in the extraordinary attitudes or sufferings of human beings, types of theology and science, of ignorance, aspiration, and various kinds of sin this general tendency of mind Dante merely shared with the whole middle age from Plotinus downward. But yet, the faith in a meaning is a great assistance to looking for one and as a general rule the more a man looks for, the more he will see. Beauty, in short, thus ceases to be a datum, and becomes a problem and in pursuing a fanciful
;
; ;
the mind will often extract the expressive essence of sensuous forms, with incomparable subtlety. Dante is not a great poet because in speaking of a she-wolf he signifies by it at once the temporal power of the Pope and the sin of avarice but because in his intentness upon the issue and the meaning, nothing that has a natural significance escapes his eye and ear. The place of sound in the Commedia, though suggested by Vergil,^ is so developed into importance as to be something new to art much of the horror of the Inferno consists in it, while the beauty of its introduction in the Paradiso gives that part of the poem almost a lyrical character.* Remarkable as is Dante's love and perception of light,* in which he follows the mediaeval tradition, and probably the superstition inherited from Plotinus, yet the modern theorist cannot complain that he has inadequately recognised the power of sound. And the same is true of human speech and gesture. No Hellene, however skilled a spectator in the theatre of this life, has portrayed the beauty and terror of visible and audible things with so true and piercing a touch as this mystic hierophant of another world. In the art of Shakespeare, as distinguished from his private life and opinions, with which we are not here concerned, we find neither this kind of subject matter nor this kind of signiinterpretation,
;
ficance.
the balance of forces in the machine of humanity is for him not seriously affected by what lies beyond could disregard "the life to come" what the grave. " an affects our action is that " we still have judgment here profound, but appears antithesis with Dante, which is really
In the
first place,
We
;
'
ven profounder than

* 3
it is if
we
fail
to realise
how
for
Dante
^n.
6.
426.
I.e.
" Continue auditae voces,"
etc.
Schelling,
See Church's JSssay on Dante for a collection of passages.
l6o
too,
heaven and
hell lay ultimately in character.
Yet when
The allowed for, the difference remains immense. first of the two dualisms which we found in the middle age, has in Shakespeare almost ceased to exist, and with it disappears the fantastic side of imagination, the dislocation of the visible world. Just here and there the presentation of real connexions is bordered or interwoven with a playful or mysterious supernatural, which does no more than furnish a decorative So far heightening to the true line of causal construction. Shakespeare reverts tothen, in sheer form of imagination, wards the Greeks for their world also was one, and their But the one world of Shakedivine was not supernatural. speare included all that was not fantastic, all that was not mere machinery in the two worlds of the middle age and his naturalism therefore was on a different plane from that of the It was in the very widest sense a romantic as conGreeks. trasted with a classical naturalism. And the second dualism, which we found in Dante, also ceased to exist, as a dualism affecting the form of imagination, in Shakespeare. Conscious allegory or symbolism, in which a thing and its meaning are two, like a riddle and its answer, was to Shakespeare a form of mediaeval pedantry, just as the dramatic unities were a form of classical pedantry. Nothing does more to bring him near to us as a modern of the moderns than his easy superiority and cultured experience in face of the pseudo-classical and romantic oddities that had come down to his age. The allegory or arbitrary symbol is discussed between Pistol and Fluellen the "elegancy and facility and golden cadence of poetry," insisted on by Holofernes;^ the figure in rhetoric is given over to Touchstone, and the syllogism and law of identity to the clown in Twelfth Night. Indeed, without pressing dramatic expression into doctrine, it is fair to take note of Hamlet's sentences, "for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold as t'were the mirror up to nature to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age, and body of the time, his form and pressure." Whether by chance or by some freak of tradition.
all this is
; ; ; ;
keeper "
who says "Imitari is nothing, so doth the ape his to prefer " the flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention." Is this a chance satire on some rebellion against the Greek theory of art?
1
It is
Holofernes
and seems
FROM TWO WORLDS TO ONE.
l6l
these words accept for the drama (I do not think that "playing" need here be sharply distinguished from the play) the very comparison by which Plato believes himself to represent the utter worthlessness of poetry, of the unreal making of things. It may be worth while to re-quote his words, which are cited in chap. II, of this work. "There are many. ways in which this feat (of 'making' everything) might be accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round you would soon make the sun and the heaven and the earth, and yourself, and the animals, and plants, and all the other creations of art as well as of nature, in the mirror." Thus once more, in comparison with Dante, we are back among the Greeks. Something indeed in the phrase which Shakespeare throws out even thus by the way, " the body of the time," "his form and pressure," indicates the representation of life as a whole, of a tendency, and a spirit, and so far modifies the simile of the mirror. But the artificial symbol, the reality, not merely wrenched apart into separate worlds, but cut and thinned down to fit its abstract meaning, has disappeared along with the hierarchy of separate interpretations and, if we are to consider only the great world-epochs of the aesthetic consciousness, is gone for ever. But though the machinery of spiritual interpretation is thrown aside, the essence of it survives as a permanent gain. The value of human souls and the significance of their destiny^ are no longer operative as abstract principles to be clothed in allegorical fantasy, but as an added force and It is worth while tenderness in the penetrative imagination. even to point out that as nature repeats herself with a difference in the phases of evolution, a relation justly perceived in one part, will as a rule bear a genuine analogy to many and therefore even relations on other planes of experience
" Is it true that we are now, and shall be hereafter But what or where depends on life's minute ?
Hails heavenly cheer, or infernal laughter first step out of the gulf, or in it ? Shall man, such step within his endeavour, Man's face, have no more play and action Than joy that is crystallised for ever,
Our
Or
grief,
an eternal petrifaction
"
Browning, Old
Pictures in Florence.
62
the hierarchy of allegorical meanings, if its fantastic or arbitrary element were withdrawn, might turn out something more real At any rate, than was known by those who formulated it. the "reasons," laws or powers which work in man and in nature are now represented in their operation as character and expression, not outside it as Deity, or theological principle, or reward and punishment. Thus the definition of Plotinus, identifying beauty with the expression of the rational, was for the first time fulfilled without abstraction or divorce of the elements involved in it, and the mediaeval aspiration to see the universe as beautiful in spite of all its contradictions, was accomplished with even a more perfect unity than that revealed by Dante.
The true Eeiations
or the later Renaissance,
In 11. concluding: the comparison which forms n the subject of chapter, we must the two
a
,-
this
recall
conceptions of the Renaissance which we spoke of as linking it respectively with what came after and with what went before. are accustomed in accordance with the former habit of thought to regard Shakespeare mainly as the creator of our present poetic world, and the inaugurator of our national greatness in the field of literature. Now in one sense this He forms the most brilliant starting point is all very true. of our literary art, just as Newton does of our science and Locke of our philosophy. But if we think that our art and its conditions are continuous with his art and its conditions, and that the perception of beauty as a living and active force was awakened in his time and has had a continuous development from then till now, in that case I imagine we are deceived. Within the history of the concrete feeling for beauty, to which poetry, and especially the drama belongs on one side, though it also borders closely upon the province of intellect, Shakespeare in every way marks not the opening but the close of a period. Since him there has been no national drama. To-day in England the drama, in the sense of stage-plays which are poetic literature, does not exist. And I imagine that what of this kind exists elsewhere, and has existed since the middle of the seventeenth century, is only enough to show clearly that some conditions, whatever they may be, have during all that time been hostile to dramatic By the year 1600 the genuine productive impulse of the art. earlier Renaissance the only productive impulse which the
We
END OF THE AGE OF ART.
163
Renaissance contained had already exhausted itself everywhere but in England, where it was later felt. Our two most competent critics agree in substance though probably not in feeling about the import of that painting by Raphael in the Vatican, which seems to set heathen poetry under Apollo on an equality with Christian doctrine under Christ. ^ And this room in the Vatican had been painted about 1508. Since then, although new movements of an isolated kind were preparing, the rich and simple beauty which was rooted in the middle age had become a thing of the past. Mannerism and the classical Renaissance on one side, science and philosophy {Descartes was born in 1596), the reformation, the English revolution, industrial changes, and the spread of printed literature on the other, were rapidly making an end of the great artistic and architectural age of the modern world. Nothing is more striking than the present revulsion of feeling on the part of the most competent judges, against the architecture of St. Peter's at Rome.^ To condemn a revolution of this kind is like condemning the course of nature. After the flower, the fruit no plant flowers for ever and all the year round. Shakespeare had, as we saw, the good fortune to come at the very close of the great creative time, bringing his pregnant and plastic genius to meet the growing influence of free thought and classic tradition, so that by wonderful good fortune he was able to deal with the whole mass of romantic material in a spirit of natural freedom that was almost classical. It was perhaps as well that he was not conversant with the Athenian dramatists. single simile of Euripides," it is said, is all that can be proved to have filtered through, by translation and retranslation, from the great Greek tragedians to Shakespeare. It comes through " the Jocastaof George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh " {1566), a motley and incongruous piece built on the model of
;
Kuskin, Zec/7tres on Painting and Architecture, p. 213, says this was the arts of Christianity. Mr. Pater, Renaissance, p. 186, says, "it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, that Raffaelle Irenaeus (end of second century, a.d.) says that Gnostics commemorates." The same set up images of Christ along with those of Plato and Aristotle. point was passed twice, first with faces set to leave paganism, and next with
^
Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, of the
.faces set to return to

2
See Mr.
Wm Morris, quoted above,
it.
p. 125.
164
the PhcBnisscB^ realty translated from the Italian without any trace of an appeal to the original, and it suggested the splendid passage in Hotspur's speech: "By heaven, methinks " It is impossible to suppose that it were an easy leap even Shakespeare's genius, lightly as it dealt with Plutarch and Ovid, and with Plautus and Seneca, would have stood It up quite unshrinkingly before Êschylus and Sophocles. appears to us that in his case the true equilibrium of form and matter was attained, and that any further reinforcement of the influence of antiquity might have impaired that singleness of vision which makes him not only the last artist of the age of piediaeval romance, but the first of that age which we rather hope for than have arrived at, the age of romantic classicism or modern classical naturalism. For the pseudo-classical tradition, which, seconded by the peculiar fulness and force of the time, was for the moment a purifying factor in art, had many transformations to undergo before it again became anything but a noxious influence in the Ultimately, indeed, through concrete aesthetic consciousness. centuries of theory and criticism, it led back to a knowledge of genuine Hellenic life and art and ideas. And the best perhaps that this knowledge in the hands of Lessing, Winckelmann, and Goethe did for art was to set it free from the fetters which a shallower knowledge had imposed. But in the purely intellectual region very great things sprang from this deeper and more genuine knowledge, and among these great things there arose, as the course of general speculation
on
its
side
demanded, a
vital
and profound
aesthetic philo-
sophy, which in its turn contributed a factor of very great value to the general speculation of the early nineteenth century. .Esthetic theory, then, as true philosophy develops, loses,
a guide to art and best aesthetic theorists has been in a great measure to protest against that very misapplication of abstract precept to art which was a survival, in the wrong place, of the same critical tradition that had been the forerunner of true aesthetic theory. If, besides this negative function,
loses, its practical relation as
;
and rightly
the
work of the
Mahaffy's Hist, of Greek Literature, i. 366. The original in Euripides runs (JPfuenissx, 504, Eteocles) aoTpwv av iXooifji, aWtpos irpos aiToXas Kol y^S iVp6t, Swaroi S>v Spatrai rdSe, T^v OfCiv iJi.eyCa-n)v mar lêtv rv/jamSa.
EFFECT OF CLASSICAL TRADITION.

aesthetic
165
philosophy can ever have a positive value for it can only be in the very secondary sense in which first through technical philosophy, and then through popular culture, it may insist on the relation of beauty to life, and explain that, for example, to " imitate " the Hellenes in the true sense is not to copy their sculpture, but to be, mutatis mutandis, such men as they were. The greatest of all new departures since the time of Shakespeare the art of music and that of landscape painting have been wholly independent both of cesthetic theory and of Hellenic example and although the widening of our world by the recovery of antique masterpieces cannot but be helpful when their effect has, so to speak, passed into the blood of our aesthetic organism, yet I imagine that Greek literature has done little directly for our greater poets, and that study from the Elgin marbles has been an influence not without its danger for our painters. True aesthetic speculation, on the other hand, has been throughout in the profoundest sympathy with the new departures and growing freedom of that sense of beauty, from which its material is drawn. So far indeed as in passing it may permit itself to judge rather than to understand, which latter is its only true function, it laments the difficulty and interruption which has been experienced by the European mind since Shakespeare's time, in carrying forward the large and free expression of life in art which he inaugurated. Whether the future will show more continuity, and less that seems to be distraction and reaction belonging to a level which Shakespeare has transcended, it is not for us to predict. Our immediate task is go forward, through the awaking of free speculation and the deepening of current criticism, to the development of aesthetic theory as an integi-al element in
artistic creation,
modem
philosophy.
a (p. 163). Mr. Churton Collins has shown that there is a good deal more to be said about Shakespeare's knowledge of the ancients. The question as between echoes and coincidences is most puzzling and interesting.
CHAPTER
The Process of
Preparation,
I-
VIII.
THE PROBLEM OF MODERN ESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY,
The
beautiful
^s
the tangible
is of interest to metaphysic meeting point of reason and
and to criticism as the expression of human life in The combination ot its changing phases and conditions. these two interests, after a protracted separate development, Under the term is the true genesis of modern aesthetic. criticism I understand for this purpose the whole detailed work of reflective thought in the exploration and appreciation
feeling,
of particular beautiful things, including therefore the services of classical scholarship in making accessible the great writers of Hellas, the labour of archaeologists both in disinterring and interpreting the treasures of Herculaneum and the other remains of the antique world, and finally the activity ot art criticism in the narrower sense, as the literary judgment passed upon works that claim to be beautiful, with reference to their beauty. In a general sense it might therefore be said that criticism from Sidney and Scaliger to Lessing and Winckelmann furnished esthetic philosophy with its data, while metaphysic from Descartes to Kant supplied it with postulates or a problem. In each of these streams of thought further combinations of tributaries may be traced, and between them are all kinds of cross-connections. But the main distinction will, I
as just. ^^ these preparatory processes, each of them The Prolonged interr^tion of extending over a period to be measured by centuries, we may find the key to a difficulty which necessarily confronts the student at the point we have now reached. This difficulty, in its widest extent,^ arises from the interitself
^-
believe,
approve
referred to in the following pages is that of Schasler, Aesthetik, Einleitung. I have attempted to indicate his conception, and my deviations from it, without the extreme lengthiness which a formal discussion of it would involve.
1
The view
II.,
Buch
166
LATENESS OF MODERN ESTHETIC.
67
mission of aesthetic philosophy, considered as a theoretical study of fine art, from the time of Plotinus to the eighteenth century of our era. But we may at once deduct from the period during which the absence of such theory is remarkable by far the larger part of the interval in question that is to say, the whole of the middle age down to the fourteenth century. The reason however for which we may so deduct it is not that which an obsolete conception of the Renaissance is ready to assign. It is not that in the middle age there was no practical aesthetic consciousness, and therefore no object-matter to which a theoretical study of art could have been directed.^ There was no aesthetic consciousness, it is said, because art was purely the handmaid to theology, and was not yet alive to its true purpose of creating the beautiful. Such an explanation combines a historical blunder with a philosophical fallacy. The actual aesthetic consciousness of the middle age was as a historical fact the most continuous and creative that the world has ever seen. And although for long centuries it was inarticulate in the more intellectually imaginative regions, and accepted theology, perhaps, as the expression of its essential instincts, yet to set this fact down as precluding its claim to rank as an aesthetic consciousness at all is to commit the serious philosophical confusion of identifying the concrete exSo pressive impulse with the reflective aesthetic intention. far from its being true that there is no genuine art-consciousness where there is no intentional aim at beauty for beauty's sake, it is probable that such intentional aim is at least a grave danger to art, if not a sure symptom of decadence. It is not the case, then, that the absence of detailed aesthetic research during the middle age was owing to the absence of It was owing not to any object-matter for such research. the lack of an art-consciousness, but to the very directness of the art-impulse, combined with the pressure of those other needs and problems which belong to the youth of a new civilization, and wlich invariably hinder the mind of such an
;
'
upon its own productions. The elements of theoretical asceticism on the one hand, and of theoretical recognition of beauty in the universe on the other, which we traced throughout this period, only show that
age from
reflecting systematically
1
Schasler,
I.e.
1 68
was not the first but the second youth of the world second youth dealing according to its wants in naive and uncritical fashion with ideas handed down from a first maturity. self-criticising theory could no more be expected of such an age, in spite of its not small intellectual equipment, than of Athens before the time of Socrates. But there still remains to be considered the period after the
it
facie
culmination of religious art in the fifteenth century, when primA it would appear that the object-matter of aesthetic existed in abundance and with regard to this period the question has been urged, " did not the full growth of modern aesthetic follow in two generations upon the art of Raphael, as that of ancient aesthetic did upon the art of Pheidias The answer given appears to me to be a false application of a simple truth. Ancient art, it is said, was practically complete when its religious inspiration had attained full expression ; but the modern mind is reflective or divided, and modern art the object-matter necessary as a condition precedent of aesthetic theory was not complete till the cycle of secular as well as of religious interest had been traversed by it in a continuous advance lasting till the eighteenth century. Now of course in the largest sense the cycle of modern art is not complete even to-day, and we hope that it never will be. But relatively speaking, the great art-age of the world did begin to draw to its close in Raphael, although by special causes it was prolonged in other countries so as just to cover our Shakespearian drama. Therefore the question is wrongly put, for the completion of the same single and continuous period to which religious art belonged, falls after Shakespeare and not after Raphael and the answer is erroneous, inasmuch as it assumes a natural progress even in pictorial art from the sixteenth century onwards whereas really there was then setting in the close of a period, only somewhat disguised by various forms and rates of disintegration in different European
;
Why
.?
countries.
The reflectiveness, range and versatility of the modern mind is rightly appreciated in the question and answer which we have examined but they fail to give weight to the distinction between such secularisation Df art as that of Raphael's successors, which marks the end of the great period, and is itself a decadence not because it is non-religious, but because it is no longer an expression o: vigorous life; and
;
LATENESS OF MODERN /ESTHETIC.
69
such secularisation as that of the Elizabethan drama, which belongs by its colour, strength and profoundness to the middle age, though touched and liberated by more modern
influences.
After the Elizabethan drama in England, and earlier still in Italy, the impulse of the middle age was exhausted, and art had entered upon its chequered modern career, which did
not attain any special completion in the eighteenth century such as would account by itself for the rise at that time of aesthetic speculation. The proof of this statement with regard to the close of a great continuous artistic age throughout the
cultured countries of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could only be given by a complete survey of the history of all those minor forms of beautiful workmanship which are an absolutely infallible test of the extent and solidity with which practical aesthetic consciousness is engrained in There has not been in any country of the mind of any age. Europe since the beginning of the seventeenth century a generation really fertile in beautiful production, whether in It is on architecture, sculpture, metal- work or wood-carving. this ground, combined with the peculiar changes that passed over painting and poetry themselves at the time referred to, that we may safely affirm the position of art in Europe since the sixteenth century, however occasionally brilliant, to have been quite different from that which it occupied before. Our question then is, not, why did sesthetic fail to arise directly after the time of Raphael, but rather, why did it fail to arise directly after the time of Shakespeare ? And the answer is, not that art retained continuous vitality till the eighteenth century, so that before that time the material of but that the peculiar nature of this aesthetic was incomplete material in modern times, consisting largely of a tradition alien to modern life, demanded a long process of critical appreciaIt is quite tion before its content could fairly reach the mind. consciousness, in comparison with the true that the modern ancient, is divided and not single. The mere territorial extension and national subdivision of the area of European culture in the seventeenth century is enough to bring this sharply before us when we compare it with the Athenian period, or even with that of Hellenism or Greco-Roman civilisation, though this had great territorial extension and some tinge of
;
local colour.
The
architecture, painting, language
and
litera-
170
ture of France, Italy, and England alone, down to the seventeenth century, form a material which could not be organised by reflection in one or two generations. And yet this was only, relatively speaking, one factor in the problem presented
to theory.
Each of the two great streams of
intellectual
philosophy and that of criticism, had not only to absorb a present, that is, a recent past, of immense complication, but had also to adjust itself to antitheses bequeathed by the remoter past called antiquity, both in its own content, and Till these two processes were in its relation to the present. completed, and their results were ready to combine, there could be no fertile aesthetic. 3. The philosophical preparation of the aesthetic problem, like the critical preparation of the ^the RrowSiS' Descartes aesthetic data, includes more than one tendency. As ultimately stated in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, that problem was the outcome of those two tendencies of modern thought, which determined his entire philosophy itself a statement of this same problem in all the principal shapes which it was capable of assuming. As a first approximation to indicating the i. nature of these two tendencies, we may mention Tradencfes. "??*^?S5'"f?* them under the technical names "universal" and " individual " respectively the Cartesian school with its descendant, the Leibnitz- Wolffian philosophy, being marked, on the whole, by insistence on the aspect of rational system and necessary connection in the universe (a tendency to which the peculiar monadic theory of Leibnitz forms no real exception) while the British empirical school, from Bacon to
activity, that of
David Hume, started rather from individual feeling or senseperception, and required that the theory of reality should be derivative from what this was supposed to announce. In the eighteenth century this latter mood was backed by all the forces of the time, especially by the. passionate sentimentalism of Rousseau and the less philosophical scepticism of Voltaire. But the logical terms " universal " and " individual " do not
give us much help in appreciating the real nature of the tendencies thus described. In all conceptions that have ever approved themselves to reason, whether in ancient or modern times, the factors thus designated necessarily find a place. must therefore, if we wish to get nearer our subject than this general approximation, distinguish the particular shape in
We
"UNIVERSAL
AND "INDIVIDUAL.
171
which the universal and the individual tendency reveal themselves in modern philosophy before Kant, first from the shape which they took in classical antiquity, and secondly from the shape which each one of them takes within the current of thought in which the other is predominant. If we can make this clear, we shall have done all that is needed to explain Kant's philosophical attitude towards aesthetic questions, and happily we are not called upon to undertake the gigantic task of narrating the whole development of pre-Kantian speculation. For philosophy proper, by which I mean the speculations of men who are known as thinkers on other grounds than their contributions to aesthetic criticism, reveals its extraordinarily abstract character during this period by an almost entire omission to deal with aesthetic questions, under this or any other name. What little demands remark in ShaftesLord Kaimes, Lessing, and bury, Leibnitz and Baumgarten Burke being counted among the critics, and not among
the philosophers we shall find occasion to notice in explaining the tendencies to which they severally belong. " Fi'*st then, we are to distinguish the " uniuished from Ancient versal " and " individual " tendencies of such FMiosopny. tjjinkers as Descartes and Locke respectively from the corresponding tendencies in any philosophers of antiquity let us say, of the Stoics on the one hand and of Epicureans on the other, should begin by noting the difficulty of finding adequate contrasted examples of such tendencies in classical In Plato and Aristotle, for instance, the two philosophy. factors of thought are fairly in equilibrium, and we could hardly find, to set against either of these thinkers, a school of real importance in whom the balance was notably different. While if we compare the Eleatics with the Atomists or with Heraclitus, we feel that the antithesis with which we are dealing has no depth of application, such as the modern antagonism between free-will and necessity, or between passion and This difficulty of finding a good example shows reason. was torn little, comparatively speaking, the ancient mind how dragged asunder by the conflicting claims of partial eleand ments in human nature each striving to pass for the whole.
;
We
look at such a contrast as that between in which the mind of the old world is beginning to pursue divergent ideals after a more modern
But
further, if
we
Stoics and Epicureans,
172
fashion,
we
see that the antagonism
is
far less
internecine
oi On representative. differentiated froni the these aspects of Hfe is irreconcilably other which is its complement ; on the other hand, neither
than
its
modern
the one hand, neither
makes so jealous and exclusive a claim to be all that there is, and to annihilate its opposite out of the reasonable world.
Stoicism is the outcome of one mood. Epicureanism of another, They are no doubt controversial in so far as they consist in rival theories, but each of them was to a great extent a way of life, and its adherents chose a path which suited their own tastes and did not bring them into conflict with the others. But, as we have amply seen, the characteristic of the Christian mind is to lay claim to the universe as belonging to the
individual soul.
;
Nothing is indifferent to this mind God is everywhere, and wherever He is there is something for man During the long centuries of the to know, to do, or to enjoy. middle age this faith had been formulated in positive doctrine, and had embodied itself unconsciously in the widening range of sensuous perception and pleasurable production, so thai when the flower of formative art had passed away, and the free intellect of Christendom began to re-construct its w'orld " and " indiin terms of self-conscious reason, both " universal vidual" points of view asserted themselves only as deepei complications within a frame of mind which to begin with was pre-eminently individual. The infinite value of a soul was a lesson too deeply bought to be readily forgotten. Thus the two tendencies of modern thought are distinguished from their ancient correlatives by their common point of departure in the thinking, feeling and perceiving subject. Scepticism, which marked the close of ancient philosophy,
characterised the beginning of modern speculation. Augustine, as we saw, very nearly anticipated the principle that my thought involves my existence, or rather, in Augustine's words, that my doubt implies my thought ^ and on some such basis, the basis of existence as a separate but thinking being, the thinking, feeling and percipient subject in modern times deliberately invades the system of things, with the conviction either a that it will certainly find therein what it demands reasonable framework according to causal laws, or general truths in harmony with observed phenomena, or a life that
;
;
Page 134 above.
REASON AND FEELING.

will
it
73
respond to its moral or hedonistic requirements. All that is expected or required to be in conformity with the organ or faculty of the subject, so that starting from itself as centre it can critically verify and reconstruct the world, from which it began by ideally isolating itself. There is nothing in antiquity at all comparable to the combined feeling of externality and of assured dominion with which Bacon and Descartes look out upon phenomena. hi. This being the general type of modern as And from eadiother. contrasted with ancient speculation, for which the history of the post-classical decadence and of the middle age has I hope prepared the reader, we have further to ask how, within this individual or modern mood, the ineradicable impulses known as "universal" and " individual " again assert themselves in philosophy. The history of philosophy appears In to answer the question in the most straightforward way. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Wolff, Baumgarten we find a continuous march of thought which is abstractly rational and in Bacon, Locke, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Hume, intellectual Rousseau, we recognise an empirical or sensationalist tendency no less abstract. The two streams meet in Kant, and it is their convergence in his system that sets the problem to later modern speculation as a whole, and more especially and
finds
;
distinctively, owing to the peculiar conditions of this problem, to
can the sensuous and the aesthetic speculation. " reconciled ?" is the general problem; "how can a ideal world be
modern
How
pleasurable feeling partake of the character of reason .*" is the same problem in its special aesthetic form. But we have further to note, as a characteristic of the modern temper, that inasmuch as each of the philosophical tendencies is theoretical and controversial, claiming absolute and exclusive universality, the logical force of facts compels each of them to be represented within the line of progression mainly dominated by the other and it is therefore only by comparison, and in virtue of their respective bases and assumed points of departure, that the one chief course of thought Bacon, who championed the is distinguished from the other. cause of "particulars" as if they were an oppressed population, held himself to be the very prophet of exact science the and Hume, whose point of departure is abstract universal the isolated sensuous impression, not only admits the universal
;
under the name of a
fiction,
but in his entire scope and method
174
of reasoning is guided by a spirit of abstract analysis which makes him, though the extremest of sensationalists in metaphysic, a utilitarian rationalist wherever he touches on
aesthetic.^
In the Cartesian school, on the other hand, the starting point the abstract universal or the systematic intelligence, in terms of which feeling and sensation are taken into account only as obscure or confused ideas. Although in Leibnitz there is a concession to individualism, as against the monotonous abstraction of Spinoza, yet the system retains its purely intellectual form, and the estimation of sensation and feeling as inferior species of intellectual idea was adopted by Wolff", and in Baumgarten's hands determined the point of view under which aesthetic was for the first time enrolled among the accepted branches of modern philosophy. iv. saw that the doctrinal dualism of early .,. -*. Connection with , i r -in MediseyaJDuai- Christianity and of the middle age was only a ""^ materialised expression for a conviction which never It would be ridiculous to say that exactly coincided with it. such men as Dante, or Francis of Assisi believed the world of But it is spiritual realities to lie far away beyond the grave. unable to satisfy the whole strenuousness true that they were of their own and still more, probably, of the popular conviction, without insisting on the antagonism between flesh and spirit under the image of a temporal and spatial separation. And again the image had a double tendency. It addressed itself then, as always, not merely to the aspiration after a region of divine reasonableness, but to that after a complete satisfaction to individual romantic sentiment. When therefore free thought set about the task of re-conquering the universe for feeling and intellect, this material separation, which had never represented the actual dividing line between reason and sense, nor determined which of these factors belong to "this" world and which to the "other," bequeathed to philosophy rather the habit or form of such an absolute antithesis as that between a " here " and a " beyond," than any particular distribution of content between the two sides of such an antithesis. It is true that the ideas of Freedom, God and Immortality continued to stand over
is
We
.
Treatise of
p. 179.
Human
Nature,
vol.
ii.
(Green and Grose),
p.
151.
See
below,
REASON AND FEELING.
75
against such notions as those of necessity, nature, and the dependence of mind on body. But it would not be possible to identify the intellectualist school of thought as the heir of the former or supernatural point of view, and the sensationalist or "empirical" as the heir of the latter or merely natural point of view for in fact the antagonism of freedom and necessity, purpose and mechanism, mind and body, is represented with startling distinctness within the philosophic movement from Descartes, through Spinoza and Leibnitz, to Wolff and his successors; while the English and later French thinkers, who start from the "here" and "now" of sensation and desire, begin by transmuting it into a system of scientific and therefore ideal necessity, against which individual feeling, having learned its own importance from being treated as a primary datum and standard, asserts itself for example in Rousseau with a claim for freedom and satisfaction both here and hereafter. Thus either reason or feeling may seize upon the place of the supernatural, and either of them, again, may be interpreted Either of these, so long as they into a purely natural system. remain purely abstract opposites, may be regarded as freedom when identified with the willing self, and must turn out to be mere necessity when found to exclude an element that the self seems in concrete experience to contain. It is not easy to decide whether one would rather be a being without affections, as Spinoza, it appears, would represent man at his best, or the defenceless prey of successive solicitations of appetite according to the strictest interpretation of Hume. What is really gained by the pre- Kantian treatment of these antagonisms is a gradually growing demonstration, owing to the manner in which they dissolve into one another, that their cause must be somewhere in the nature of mind. V. The observations upon beauty thrown out ^proî^l^^by philosophers whether in England, France, or puiosophy. Qermany, before Kant, do not possess the note of modern aesthetic, and are not the true progenitors of progressive that study. For, as we have partly seen, and shall further see when we come to deal with Kant, it draws its peculiar import
;
from the fact that it constitutes an essential and almost primary element in the treatment by which Kant attempted
to reconcile the conflicting philosophical
movements
that con-
verged upon him
and
it
would be
false history to represent
as springing from certain external symptoms of these move-
176
merits
the problem which really sprang from the whole system of forces to which they belonged. Kant no doubt borrowed from his predecessors in philosophy both the name of aesthetic and certain features of its treatment but the need of it lay deeper in his thought than any suggestions of theirs, and the material which was destined after Kant's time to meet this need more fully was being stored up elsewhere than in
;
abstract metaphysic. must therefore regard pre-Kantian aesthetic, so far as it exists at all in the great philosophers, not as the generating cause of its later development, but only as an external attribute of the movement which was really such a cause. It is
We
not necessary to treat it in great detail. The pioneers of free thought do not give much attention to the phenomena of the beautiful. Descartes and Spinoza, Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, throw themselves at once into what seem the most urgent and central issues of man's position in the world into questions relating to human freedom, the nature of God, the extension of knowledge, the nature of the mind and of society. And in some degree the severe rationalism of these philosophers, whether its root bej intellectualist or sensationalist, implies an attitude towards fine art that reminds us not a little of Plato. But yet in substance their ideas are far more favourable to its importance than are those of antiquity, for they stand on the firm foundation slowly laid by the Christian consciousness in all the popular developments of the argument from design which is equivalent to saying, that even if they doubt the teleology of the world, they do not doubt its being rational and accessible to intelligence through and through. Now on the basis of this conviction, upon which the modern mind is firmly established, the due consideration of beauty and knowledge is a mere question of time it is only natural that reason should first consciously appreciate itself in its more plainly and directly intellectual expression. It is noticeable from this point of view that Descartes (i 596-1650) wrote a "Compendium Musicse" music, it must be remembered, formed part of the educational " quadrivium " of the middle age along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, under the name of a science and though Spinoza (1632-1677) seems to have recognised no meaning at all in
SHAFTESBURY.
177
the term beauty,^ which for him could only designate a confused form of intelligence, yet we find in ('*) Leibnitz ( 1 646-1 7 1 6), an expression echoing Leiimite mediseval associations, while containing the germ of many later researches into the power of sound * " Musica est arithmetica nescientis se numerare animi," * " music is counting performed by the mind without knowing that it is counting," or, translating negative into positive terms in conformity with Leibnitz's system, " music is a felt relation of
;
number." This, however in need of further explanation, is a plain case of " reason in the form of feeling," and so more generally Leibnitz falls back on the aesthetic point of view of Augustine by comparing the permission of evil in the
universe to the introduction of ugly colour or discordant artist, enhancing the beauty of his work as a whole. This, of course, involves the assumption that what is beautiful to feeling is ultimately an expression of harmony, though capable of including apparent contradiction. The above is enough to indicate in general the startingpoint of modern philosophy, so far as it affects the place of beauty in the system of things it is separated from classical antiquity by that whole interval of a new faith which separates Augustine or Erigena from Plato, but it is also inspired with its own freely analytic and progressive impulse. (b) Shaftesbury (1670-17 13) stands, so far as aesthetic is concerned, on the same metaphysical ground of the Christian intelligence, believing beauty to be an expression of the divine life of the world, which he contrasts with dead matter in a way too much akin to Plotinus, and is therefore unable to find an explanation for ugliness or evil. He sees, however, that the true purpose of art is to bring before the mind ideas and sentiments in shapes drawn from sense-perception, the trained eye and ear being ultimate judges of what is beautiful His extension of the terms "beauty" and "sense" or not. the goodness of morality and the faculty by. which we to judge of it, is fatal of course to a distinct demarcation of the But yet, by insisting on the education of aesthetic region.
sound by an
1 3
Erdmann, E.
We shall
Between
Tr., ii. 85. notice later the eflfect on aesthetic of the rise of musical art. Descartes' birth and Leibnitz's death, Opera sprang up in Paris,
Italy, Germany 8 See Lotze,
and England.
G.
d.
A., 275.
178
the art-sense, and by his detailed attention to the phenomena of art, he marks a stage in the growing tendency to appreciate beautiful production as in its own right an important activity of human life, and an important element in history. His criticisms on the limits of time over which an action, represented in painting, may extend, anticipates some of the discussions in Lessing's Laocoon. So far as we can judge, the content of reason which beauty embodies for sense did not signify for Shaftesbury anything more than the formal principle of antiquity the principle of The advance lies in the complete and unity in multiplicity. confident identification of beauty with the aspect presented by art and nature to trained perception. It is easy to speak of Shaftesbury as a Platonist but we must remember that in place of a fierce anti-sensuous dualism, only indicating at times the identification of fact and reason, and for the most part hostile to art, we have now an easy-going pantheistic monism, almost identifying God, reason, and ordinary material Nature, and taking the charm of visible things as an obvious outcome It is the world that has moved of the divine principle. on, and that has verified the highest of Plato's suggestions Shaftesbury is far from being a great philosopher, and does little but reproduce, in terms of the individual's sensibility, the current ideas of his age. while, before leaving ^* '^ worth the ('^) Hume. British philosophers, to notice the observations upon beauty made in passing by David Hume (1711-1776) in the Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1738. I should hardly have thought it fair to lay stress upon them, being fragmentary, and contained in a youthful work, were it not that they are in fact of considerable value. " If ' we consider all the hypotheses which have been formed either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. This is the distinguishing character of beauty, and forms all the difference betwixt it and deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness.
Treatise of Human Nature.
Green and Grose.
Vol.
ii.,
p. 95,
BEAUTY REFERRED TO SYMPATHY,
179
Pain and pleasure, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence." " Beauty, like wit, cannot be defined, but is discerned only by a taste or sensation." The greater part of the pleasure of beauty arises, however, from the idea of convenience or utility. Now the point which seems deserving of attention, is the precise mode of connection between this idea of
and the sensation of beauty. For Hume lays down with absolute clearness that beauty, as a rule, arises from a utility which does not at all concern the spectator whose sense of beauty is awakened, but only the owner or person immediately affected by the real properties of the object. It is therefore only by sympathy that the feeling of beauty can exist for the spectator. curious example is as follows ^ ^' I know not but a plain, overgrown with furze and broom, may be, in itself, as beautiful as a hill covered with vines or olive-trees though it will never appear so to one who is acquainted with the value of each. But this is a beauty merely Oif imagination, and has no foundation in what appears to the
utility
senses."
This example seems to indicate a concession to what might called the vulgar doctrine of utility, because monetary value does not imply high structural organisation. But we must not fail to notice in it the pregnant distinction between beauty of imagination what would now be called beauty of relation and beauty for the sense, or beauty of form. If we ask for the nature and grounds of the latter, I think we must suppose that Hume resolves it into a more obvious case of the relation of utility a case in which utility is plainly expressed in the physical form of the object. And here again, the pleasure or pain upon which beauty or deformity depend, as in the uneasiness produced by an ill-balanced figure in a painting, gains its "vivacity" through sympathy alone." I suppose that his reason for not distinguishing, in the case of a work of art, between the spectator and the person really affected, is simply that in this case there can be no such person, and therefore our sympathy can only be with each other's ideas, and not with any person's actual advantage or injury.
be
Whatever we may think of the mechanism of impressions .and ideas as described by Hume, it is plain that his doctrine of
J6., p. 151.
2 73., p.
152.
l8o
Utility in
HISIORY OF /ESTHETIC.
beauty does not involve a
selfish interest on the part that it practically implies a distinction in of the spectator, and natural beauty as well as in art between aesthetic semblance and real effect; and further, that his idea of an aesthetic
generalisation of pleasure and pain through sympathy is strikingly parallel to Aristotle's idea of an artistic generalisation thus get an approximate anticipaof fear through pity. tion of Kant's "form of teleology without the idea of an end," and also of his " disinterested pleasure." It is so easy to be unjust to any one who mentions the term utility in connection with beauty, as Socrates too did, that these observations
We
seemed
to
me
to
be necessary.
And
moreover,
we have
in
Hume more distinctly than in Shaftesbury, and far more plainly than in Hutcheson, the important conception of a taste or sensation which though a mere feeling is affected with pleasure and pain by structural forms and relations of a definite character, analysable by reflection, though not analysed by the appreciating sensibility itself. Such an attempt to trace the content of beauty is not to be set down as the mere abstract identification of it with pleasure-producing quality. Nature of the (^) It is of course a twice-told tale that the Advance. individualistic thinkers of Britain from Bacon to Hume, in the sphere of metaphysic or general philosophy, drove a destructive analysis deeper and deeper into knowledge until with Hume the last word of sensational empiricism was spoken. But it is a total misconception to apply the principle of this progression to the province of positive aesthetic research, which did not at that time form a central issue in metaphysical philosophy. And thus when we are told ^ that British aesthetic paissed from Platonism (in Shaftesbury) to Aristotelianism (in Lord Kaimes) and subsequently ran into materialistic empiricism of the shallowest kind in Burke and Hogarth-r- Reynolds being omitted we feel that the great formulae of historical philosophy have in this case hardly been grasped with the thoroughness which is needed for their conThe age in question was an age of refleccrete application. tion, of antagonistic abstractions, of the meeting of extremes But if we are going to interpret history all this is quite true. by such a conception, we must not pick out a thinker here and a critic there, and throw them into a succession according;
Schasler,
i.
313.
THE REAL COURSE OF REFLECTION.
i8l
to their intellectual characters, quite apart from their special forms of preoccupation with the problems of the age. must realise that the reflective character of the time, like all such dominant tendencies, was no mere intellectual instinct of certain writers in philosophy and literature, but was dictated by the whole existing situation of facts and forces, which placed the individual subject in presence of a set of completed systems, antiquity, mediaeval art, theology, political authority, by overcoming which and reasserting itself in spite of them it had to win a new positive freedom and positive content. Now if we compare one" of these forms of conquest with another even though the same thinker is engaged in both, as may well happen we construct a transition and imagine a tendency which is altogether unreal. As the English passed, in aesthetic, from Platonism to Aristotelianism, so the French passed, we are told,^ from Aristotelianism (in Batteux) to Platonism (in Cousin), and thus the necessity by which onesided abstractions work out their opposites is supposed to be exemplified. All this is utterly unhistorical. Sidney, Corneille, Shaftesbury as an art critic, Lord Kaimes, Batteux, Lessing, were all interested not in the issues of metaphysic, but in the adjustment of modern aesthetic feeling, always comparatively speaking somewhat romantic, to the classical tradition, represented at first by conventional conceptions of Aristotle and of Greek beauty, and then, as criticism deepened, by something nearer the real Aristotle and real Greek art and poetry. Within this domain of criticism the work of reflection took the form, prescribed for it by circumstances, of struggling with the given antithesis which was the primary fact of the situation, and as reflection gradually broke through the rind of tradition, its results became more and more empirical in the sense of being more vital, more concrete, more akin to the true philosophical speculation which was to arise from its endeavours. It is a wild confusion to identify the appeal to aesthetic fact in Hogarth, Burke and Reynolds, under the ambiguous name empiricism, with the increasingly severe and abstract analysis of genered experience which culminated in the metaphysic of David Hume. The one made content richer, as we have seen in the aesthetic suggestions of Hume himself; the other
We
Schasler,
l.c.
l82
it
poorer for the moment, and only richer in a constructive sense, by helping to prepare the place which a fuller conThe two movements together tent would one day occupy. were therefore, as we have urged throughout, pioneering the junction which followed in and after Kant. I may add that in order to gain probability for the perverse view which has been indicated, Schasler omits Sidney at the beginning of the English development, and adds on Cousin, who belongs to a wholly different age, at the end The "critical" movement, in the sense deof the French. fined at the beginning of the present chapter, is in England from Sidney to Burke and Hogarth, in France from Corneille
made
Rousseau and Diderot, in Germany from Gottsched and Ramler to Schiller and Goethe. If the true nature of this movement had been understood, the attempt would not have been made to display an antithetical progression by simply
to
passing in the account of English thought from a metaphysical to a critical writer, and in that of French thought from a critical to a metaphysical one. The movement of eighteenth-century metaphysic in France needs no separate treatment. The operative forces that framed the problem for Kant are adequately represented within the region of philosophy, by the British school on the one hand, and the Wolffian, containing in it many elements of French (Cartesian) origin, on the other. (^) ^^ *^^ British school, starting from what is Baumgarteii most individual in the individual, worked upwards to aesthetic ideas from observing the trained artistic sense, or from analysing the conditions of disinterested pleasure, the Cartesian school, continuous for our purposes with the Leibnitzian, worked downward to aesthetic ideas by ultimately attempting to extend its intellectualist theory, which dealt primarily with knowledge, to the phenomena of feeling and And the extension thus initiated by Baumgarten perception. (i 714-1762) under the name " ^sthetica," was so far characteristically concerned about the theory of beauty as to hand down the term Esthetic as the accepted title for the philosophy of the beautiful. The genesis of his conception appears to have been as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Wolff, form as follows. intellectualist philosophers an unbroken sequence, in spite of Leibnitz's revolt against the abstract unity of Spinoza's " sub-
CLEAR AND CONFUSED.

Stance."
183
Throughout this whole succession the passions and sense-perceptions are described in terms of the abstract intelligence, and therefore negatively, that is to say, by the attribute in which they differ from an abstract idea. Both sense-perception and passion are, according to Spinoza, " confused acts of thought,"^ and in Wolff's psychology there is a complete set of faculties belonging to the " obscure" portion of knowledge, and corresponding to the faculties of the distinct intellect. Now clear thinking was treated by Wolff in the science or method of Logic, both theoretical and practical, as an introduction to theoretical philosophy or metaphysic with its four parts. Ontology, Cosmology, Ethics, and Psychology. It occurs then to Baumgarten, who in every way continues to push the survey of science into detail he wrote a Sketch of Philosophical Encyclopcedia a term inherited by German philosophy from late Greek and mediaeval education to prefix to the Wolffian logic, or method of clear knowledge, a still prior science or method of sensible or obscure knowledge, to be called Esthetic. Such a preliminary science might, it has been observed,* have taken the form of inductive logic, or it might be added, as in Kant, of an enquiry into the nature of the forms of sense. But Baumgarten is thoroughly consistent. Inductive logic and the theory of space and time both belong to the doctrine of clear knowledge such a doctrine as that of modern logical textbooks where they deal with " the extraction of general proBut the subject of the positions from sense-perception." ^sthetica is " obscure conception " qua obscure, that is knowledge in the form of feeling and remaining in that form. To us, no doubt, sense-perception is apt to seem the clearest of data, and we hardly see the force of a distinction which ranks it as " confused." I imagine that what is meant by clear and confused through this whole succession of philosophies may be illustrated by the possibility of adequately expressing this or that matter in I suppose that a clear idea is one which is so cut words.* down and defined as to be communicable by a conventional sign with a tolerable degree of adequacy, while a confused
'
Erdmann, E. Tr., ii. 85. Zimmermann, i. 169. See, e.g., Erdmann on Leibnitz and
Descartes,
ii.
182.
84
is
one which remains of a kind and complexitysuch as a harmony of colour which language cannot reproduce. That the "confused idea" can have an order of its own, which is appreciable to feeling, seems to be presupposed in the idea of beauty, and insisted on by Baumgarten in his disidea
cussion.
The sphere of aesthetic, then, is a whole complex of faculties, those which represent any connection in a confused form,^ and which, taken together form the "analogon rationis," the parallel or parody of reason in the province of confused knowledge. Thus it is clearly more akin to the subject of psychology than to that of logic or elementary metaphysic, and appears to me to be a conception to which modern psychology, constantly finding parallels to logical processes in unconscious or subBut again conscious mental movements, is bringing us back. this point of view, not as a parallel in it was not quite from the form of feeling to logical processes, that the region of Such obscure ideas pressed itself on Baumgarten's attention. a treatment would still make the excellence of sensuous perception consist in a form of truth which can only exist in so far as the perception is after all interpreted into a judgment, a feeling that "something is so or so." Baumgarten maintained his distinction more thoroughly than this, and with a coherence for which he hardly receives due commenHe gives to the perfection of sensuous knowledge, dation. i.e., of feeling or sensation, the name of beauty, as the maniso I understand the accounts of him festation in feeling that attribute which when manifested in intellectual knowof Only it is difficult to see how he could ledge is called truth. call aesthetic thus construed the art of beautiful thinking (pulchre cogitandi),^ for thinking always conveys to us the idea of an intellectual process. His analysis of the content of this perfection is not adequate to his conviction as to the source from which it is to be In the former he does not advance beyond the drawn. theories of antiquity in the latter he shares the consciousness of his age, though hidden under a phraseology that recalls the In every way therefore he is on the old attitude of Plato. threshold of a new movement. The idea of perfection had played a great part in the
Zimmermann,
A.^
i.
165.
Erdmann,
ii.
240.
PERFECTION AND IMITATION.
85
Speculation of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, and was directly transmitted from Wolff to Baumgarten. It might be generally defined as the character of a whole in so far as this whole is affirmed by its parts without counter-action, and thus perfection became a postulate of everything real, because reality depended upon power to harmonise with the greatest number of conditions. In Wolff, therefore, it naturally comes to mean the mere logical relation of the whole to part, or unity in variety, and this is the sense in which Baumgarten also employs it. The content of beauty for him is therefore nothing more than our old friend the formal principle of unity in variety which may, of course, at any moment take the form of teleology. Whatever is opposed to the perfection of sensuous knowledge, that is to the unity of parts in the whole of the sense-perception, is ugly. But from the same tradition which gave him the abstract idea of perfection, he derives a peculiar conviction as to the source from which alone such perfection can enter the region of feeling. It must be observed that in speaking of perfection of sensation, when we might speak of sensitive appreciation The character of of perfection, he is perfectly in his right. the perceptive content as such and in itself is what concerns aesthetic, just as the character of knowledge as such and in The distinction of subject and itself is what concerns logic. object concerns metaphysics, but not logic nor sesthetic. The greatest degree of perfection was to be found, according to Leibnitz, in the existing universe, every other possible Baumgarten, insystem being as a whole less perfect. heriting this view, which is really a translation into philosophy \ of the Christian teleological consciousness, makes nature, the world accessible to sense-perception, the standard and pattern This raises in a quaint form the whole problem of of art. The poetical world of fable and the fantastic imagination. possesses only " heterocosmic " * truth, and theremythology fore has a less degree of perfection and of beauty than the The introduction of the heathen actual world of experience. deities in modern poetry appears to him therefore thoroughly Imitation of nature is the law of art. erroneous. The fundamental connection of his views, in spite of their verbal coincidence with the doctrine of antiquity, is altogether
'
" Belonging to another world."
86
nature which is to be imitated is for him the of perfection, not as in Plato a secondary and inferior world and to reproduce it is a high but possible task, The hiatus not an idle indulgence and a vain endeavour. is between the formal principle of perfection, i.e. unity in variety, and the immense and individual splendour of the world, which that abstract principle is wholly inadequate to
modern.
The
;
revelation
deeper analysis was needed to exhibit this concrete content as a development of that abstract principle. In many respects the attitude of later German philosophy
comprehend.
towards aesthetic was anticipated, perhaps influenced, by Baumgarten. The feeling that art was a sort of preparatory discipline to speculative knowledge, and the doubt whether the two could thoroughly co-exist, seems to reproduce itself in Schiller and in Hegel, although they rejected the still more decided intellectualist prejudice which makes Baumgarten apologise for his subject as something below the dignity of philosophy, but after all interesting to the philosopher as a man among men.* Again, the idea of beauty as felt perfection lends itself of course readily to Kant's conception of teleology without the distinct notion of an end, although the other important Kantian distinction between the beautiful and the object of desire, does not appear to have been made by Baumgarten otherwise than through the general leaning to knowledge more than pleasure as the central characteristic of beauty.
But all perfection gives pleasure and causes desire, and beauty is a kind of perfection. The desire for the real object suggested in art, and the interest in the beautiful as beautiful, are perhaps not distinguished by him, as they are not with absolute clearness by Kant. Apart from this one point of obscurity the definite demarcation of aesthetic from logic and ethics was in itself a considerable service to philosophy and the bias which its author showed against the " unnatural or " fictitious " started the enquiry into the ideal on the whole in a right direction only a certain weakness which Baumgarten had for allegory, as fiction in the service of truth, perhaps affected Winckelmann or at least was shared by him. It seems needless to discuss the views of other philosophers between Baumgarten and Kant, such as Mendelssohn. What
"^
^ *
Zimmermann,
i., 159. Hegel, ^sth., Introd. E. Tr., See for the solution Modern Painters, iii. 131.
p. 8.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.

is
87
essential in the culture of
the later eighteenth
century-
belongs rather to the critical than to the speculative movement, and will be indicated in the next chapter. Kant took up the problem of general philosophy on its German side directly from Baumgarten, from whose compendia he was at first in the habit of lecturing.^ When Hume and Baumgarten
had written the array of

plete.
strictly philosophical forces
was com-
suggestions made on points of aesthetic by them and other writers, although no doubt they furnished Kant with the technical term Esthetic, and perhaps with some of his detailed ideas, were not the principal factors in the question that urged itself upon him. The question was, I repeat, in its general form, " How can the sensuous and the ideal world be reconciled ? " and in its special aesthetic form, " How can a pleasurable feeling partake of the character of " reason ? It was the former question which gave, for Kant, its full import to the latter and it was the concrete solution of the latter, following upon Kant's statement which was in itself half an answer, that paved the way for a new and more fertile treatment of the former.
;
The
Erdmann,
ii.
238.
CHAPTER
IX.
THE DATA OF MODERN ESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY.

In the beginning of the last chapter we distinguished th< processes which paved the way for modern aesthetic speculatioi into the formulation of the problem by philosophy, and th( This latter process preparation of the data by criticism. forms the subject of the present chapter. Criticism in the widest sense includes, as we saw, th< work of classical scholarship or philology, of archaeology, anc of art-criticism or the appreciation of beautiful things as beautiful. Each of these movements represents in its own form that antithesis which is inherent in the position of the modern world as coming after the ancient, and which distinguishes its whole basis of thought and feeling, as historical and reflective, from the direct naturalism of antiquity. It is not necessary for our purpose to write a complete account oi classical philology or of archaeology from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Such an account of either as the late Mr. Mark Pattison might have written would be of the utmost value for the comprehension of modern philosophy, but would demand a knowledge such as few but he have possessed, and would considerably exceed in compass the whole of the present work. ! I will simply recall two great moments in the ciaasioai Philology, history of philology which have been indicated by the writer to whom I have just referred.
Joseph scaiiger.
>
,
.
his Lfe
1 583 Joseph Scaliger^ published ^^ J" Emendattone Temporum, the first
year
attempt
to apply modern astronomical knowledge " to get a scientific basis for historical chronology." This attempt led up to the
Thesaurus Temporum (1606), "in which* every chronological

relic
extant in
Greek or Latin was reproduced, placed

intelligible."
in order,
restored,
and made
*
Mark
Pattison's Essays,
I.
162.
* lb.,
162.
PHILOLOGY.
189
This great work involved nothing less than the conception of Universal History, breaking down the barrier, then considered absolute, between the classical and the biblical world,
and including
classical
in the
also.
world
problem of historical research the extraThe importance of this achievement for
is not so much in the active effect of its great idea for, it appears, this idea remained unfertile through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as in the proof which it affords that by the beginning of the seventeenth century the remains of antiquity were in the possession of the learned world in a degree which could suggest the conception of understanding the ancient civilisations as a whole. " J"^^ about two hundred years later,^ in 1 786, F. A. woit F. A. Wolf " prevailed on the Chancellor of the University (at Halle) to erect a philological seminarium for the special training of classical teachers." In the conduct of this seminarium* Wolf developed his conception of "philology," as a student of which " Studiosus philologise " he had insisted upon being set down twenty years before in the matriculation-book at Gottingen, where, as at other universities, no such faculty was then recognised. Philology, he conceived, was now capable of becoming a study in its own right ; the ancient' languages were no longer the mere introduction to law or theology, nor could they any longer be held as the storehouse of all knowledge. The purpose of philology was more and less than these. It was. nothing short of the knowledge of human nature as exhibited That is to say, the inheritance of classical learnin antiquity. ing, which had so long appeared as a foreign element, mysterious alike in its value and in its worthlessness, within the romantic life of modern Europe, had now been mastered, and had become transparent, and was seen to deal with utterances of human nature belonging to a development of which we also, with our utterances and self-expressions, form a part. The Prolegomena to Homer, published in 1795, further and most profoundly stimulated thought in this direction, by show-
us
1 *
Id.
ib.,
363.
in which the intending teacher teaches under the eye of the inspector in this case Wolf. For the origin and antiquity of this, system see Hatch's Hibbert Lectures. He refers to it our term " Prakctor."
A system of classes
Id.
ib.
igo
ing that "
^ single poet, writing according t< but a name which stood for a golden age of the The fixec true spontaneous poetry of genius and nature." ideas of the eighteenth century had been breaking up before An interest hac this time, and breaking up in this direction. Ossian and Percy's Reliques hac arisen in popular poetry. stirred the sympathy of German poets and men of letters. The whole critical movement, in the narrower sense of artcriticism, which we shall consider below, had, from Gottsched More especially, to Goethe, a tendency of the same kind. British writings translated into German^ had pointed out the " naturalness " of Homer, and the probability that he composed without the help of writing. Thus when Wolf inaugurated his profound conception of philology and made clear the difference between the natural and the artificial epic, the time was obviously ripe for an appreciation of the classical writings in their deepest relation to definite phases of life, and as objects of such appreciation the works of ancient art and poetry became materials for aesthetic philosophy. It is remarkable that the dates of Wolfs great achievements fall within or close upon the fateful decade (i 790-1 800) in which by an unparalleled concentration of influences the future form of modern aesthetic, and with it of modem objective idealism, was in its essence determined. ^- ^^^ higher spirit of archaeology is the same Archaoiogy with that of philology as Wolf defined it, and indeed he included in the latter science the study and interpretation of ancient works of formative art. While, on the other hand, that part of the work of such a student as Winckelmann, which bears most directly upon our subject, is of a semi-philosophical nature, and must be treated under the head of art-criticism rather than under that of archaeology. In the present section my purpose is only to point out one or two tangible facts which appear to me to be significant, concerning the dates at which important relics of antiquity became known to modern inquirers. I have not met with any conspectus of information on this head such as a historian of ancient formative art could put together in a few lines, which would be, as I imagine, of the utmost interest and value for the history of culture. My own knowledge on the subject is
Homer was no
art
and
rule,
'
D. B. Monro,
art.
" Homer," ttcyd. Brit.
See
id. ib.
THE LATIN RENAISSANCE.

far too
I91
meagre
but
give some facts as better than none
at
all.
Early Discoveries on itauan Sou.
iIt IS a curious external illustration of the nature which we have ascribed to that classical tradition which the Renaissance handed down, that its earlier days were occupied with the later works of art. The Apollo Belvedere, probably a Roman copy of a fine statue of the third century B.C., was discovered about the end of the fifteenth century at Antium. The Laocoon, probably an original of the Rhodian school of about the second century
B.C., was found at Rome in 1506, and was known to Michael Angelo, who attempted to restore the father's right arm. The Belvedere torso of Heracles, by Apollonius in the first century B.C., was found at Rome about the same time, and was enthusiastically admired both by Michael Angelo and by Winckelmann. The group of Dirce, an original of the same school as the Laocoon, was found in the Baths of
Caracalla in 1525. The figures of the Florentine Niobe group, a Roman copy of a very fine original of the second period of Greek sculpture (of which better partial copies exist than the Florentine), were found at Rome in 1583. I do not know that before the middle of the seventeenth century any modern had seen a work of Greek sculpture executed between 500 and 400 B.C. Winckelmann,^ one hundred years later, mentions that Montfaucon believed no works of Greek sculpture to be in existence more ancient than the Roman period. This order of discovery is not accidental. It arises from the Latin character of the Renaissance, and from the consequent fact that its direct contact with antiquity was on Italian soil, where the greatest works of Hellas, even if some had been transported there by purchasers or plunderers, were infinitely out-numbered by productions of a later age, and by copies freely multiplied,^ both from earlier and from later The diversion of interest towards Greek soil was originals. subsequent to this time, and parallel with the deeper interpretation of the classical tradition. Just as we saw to be the case with classical form in litera-
with the British Museum Caryatid from the temple of Athene Polias, we shall see the immensity of the gulf between different renderings of the same type.
2
Gesch. d. Kunst des AUerthums, viii. i. 26. If we compare a Greco-Roman Caryatid
192
ture, so too the ancient sculptures
were regarded
in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries chiefly as models for artists.* After the sixteenth century a beginning of disinterested study was made under the influence of the conception that ancient poetry and ancient formative art were especially fitted to one another ; a conception which Lessing is really disputing in that part of the " Laocoon " which refers to the works of Spence and Caylus.^ iiIt was in the latter half of the seventeenth Eaxiy Travels in Greece, century, shortly before the fatal bombardment of the Acropolis by Morosini in 1687,* that Spon and Wheler published the narratives of their tour in Greece, and that Carrey, a French artist, commissioned by the French ambassador to the Porte, made those sketches of the Parthenon sculptures which are the earliest indications of their state. Morosini himself had, it seems, some of the collector's enthusiasm, or at least knew the value of the marbles and his desire of possession was no less ruinous than his warlike operations for not only did a shell dropping into the Turkish powder store v/ithin the Parthenon blow down the middle part of the building, but after the Venetians had occupied the city the workmen employed by Morosini to remove the horses of Athene from the western pediment let them fall on the rocks of the Acropolis, where they were dashed to pieces. Many fragments of statues were carried off by officers of Morosini's force, some of which have since been recovered.* Carrey's drawings do not seem to have been known to Winckelmann, and in fact they would be of little use before the sculptures
illustrate
;
themselves were accessible. iiiremarkable stimulus to archaeological Hercuianeum and Pompeu. research was given by the accidental discovery of antiquities at Hercuianeum in 1709, leading to the commencement of excavations in 1 738, and by similar discoveries leading to researches at Pompeii from 1755 onwards, Winckelmann arrived at Rome in this year, and from time to time
art. " Archseology." of their works are suggestive : Spence's Polymetis, or. An Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Ancient Artists, 1755, and Caylus' Tableaux tirks de
^ ^
Encyd. Brit,
titles
The
I'lliade.
^
Murray's Hist, of Greek Sculpture, Overbeck, i. 291.
ii.
21.
THE ELGIN MARBLES.
93
wrote reports of the Herculanean discoveries, on which part

of his discussion upon the painting of the ancients is based.^ It does not indeed appear that any works of the best time were added to the data of aesthetic by the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii what was gained, in addition to very considerable archaeological knowledge, and a large mass of characteristic though late Greek art, was rather the sense of vitality and completeness in this new contact with antiquity. The concentration of aesthetic and partly aesthetic activity in England, France, and Germany round the year 1750, in which, as we saw, Baumgarten first gave the science its name, is exceedingly remarkable, and the Herculanean discoveries must take their place among its causes.* This interest was not confined to the Continent. Among Winckelmann's grumblings^ at the destruction and improper restoration of many works of art in recent times, we find the complaint that lately and during his stay in Rome many noteworthy objects had been carried ofiF to England, " where, as Pliny says, they In Winckelmann's are banished to remote country-houses." own opinion there was nothing at Rome in his day belonging to the high or grand style of Greek sculpture except the (Florentine) Niobe group then in the Villa Medicis at Rome, and a Pallas " nine palms high " * in the Villa Albani. iv. From 1 75 1 onwards the activity of EnglishGreece proper, jnen was directed to making known the monuments of Greece proper and the labours and publications of many explorers* between that date and the early years of the present century no doubt marked and swelled the rising tide of interest which made it possible for Lord Elgin to conceive and carry out (in 1 81 2) the idea of securing the Parthenon marbles for It was not till about the same time that the pedithis country. ment sculptures from -^gina, and the frieze from Phigaleia,
; ;
Gesch. d. Kunst, Bk. 7, i. 3. Gesch. d. Kunst, Einleitung, xiv. 3 It is fair to point out how the interest helped to create its own material. The fact that a prince, seeking crushed marble to make plaster for his new where there was plenty villa, was told by some peasants that they knew at Portici in 1709) would not in every period have led to the (Prince Elbeuf
2
the buried city. * G. d. K., 8, ii. 4, and see p. 245 below. 5 Stuart and Revell, and the explorers sent out by the Society of Dilettanti (founded 1734), continued to publish drawings and descriptions at intervals
scientific excavation of
throughout this period.
194
to
became known and were brought

respectively.
terest,
Germany and England
later labours of the nineteenth century, with It is of intheir magnificent result, do not concern us as yet.
The
his
however, to notice an aspiration of Winckelmann, which countrymen have in late years splendidly fulfilled. " I cannot refrain," he writes,^ "in concluding this chapter, from making known a desire which concerns the extension of our knowledge in Greek art, as well as in scholarship and the history This wish of mine is for a journey to Greece, of that nation. not to places which many have visited, but to Elis, to which no scholar nor person skilled in art has yet penetrated. What, as regards works of art, is the whole Lacedaemonian territory compared with the one town of Pisa in Elis, where I am certain that in the Olympic games were celebrated ? this place the results would be inconceivably great, and that by careful exploration of this soil a great light would dawn upon art." Hegel, in his aesthetic lectures, which continued down to
. . .
1828, profited by some at least of the discoveries of the early He makes good use* of a description of nineteenth century. the ^ginetan pediment sculptures, which was published, with He was acquainted, at least by notes by Schelling, in 181 7. hearsay, with the Elgin marbles, and probably learnt much from the works of Hirt' and Meyer,* both contemporaries of Goethe and historians of art. Hirt describes in his preface how he had kept pace with the advance of archaeological knowledge from the time of his paper in " Horen " (1797), and how great the harvest of material had been during his lifetime, together with the effect which in his judgment the extended study of the actual monuments must necessarily have on aesthetic theory. As the passage illustrates the natural development which the idea of beauty passed through by the mere deepening and widening of experience and appreciation, it will be well to quote it at
length.
"No age * has ever been more energetic and more fortunate than ours in the last fifty years [written 1833] in the discovery
1
G. d. K., 8, iii. 20. Hegel's jEsth., ii. 382 and 458. * Geschichte d. Bildenden Kiinste bet den Altai, 1833.
^
Same
title,
1824-36.
5 Hirt., Gesch., etc., Preface.
HIRT S LIFETIME.
195
and increase of materials and
in the establishment of great
collections for the benefit of students.
Egypt, with the neighbouring countries and the Upper have been opened up; so have Babylonia, Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor. Greece has been repeatedly explored, and its most important sculptures have passed into European museums. Zeal for the discovery of Italian antiquities has been augmented on all hands. Not merely the tombs of Sicily and Magna Graecia have surrendered their spoil, but so has the long mysterious Etruria. Then think of the metopes of Selinus, and of the most recent excavations of rare sculptures at Olympia [by the French expedition]. The excavations of the buried cities at Vesuvius continue to be fertile, together with the inexhaustible mines of Rome and the vicinity. Even more distant regions, such as the coasts of the Black Sea, France, Spain and Germany, have contributed to the mass of material So [owing to Hirt's studies in Rome] I came into conflict with my predecessors Winckelmann and Lessing, as with my contemporaries Herder and Goethe. Objective beauty was assumed to be the principle of ancient art. I, on the contrary, pointed to the monuments, and showed by ocular demonstration that these monuments displayed all forms, the commonest and even the ugliest, as also the most beautiful, while the representation of the expression always corresponded to the character and the motives. Consequently, I maintained that the principle of ancient art was not the objectively beautiful and the softening (Milderung) of expression, but simply and solely the individually significant, or characteristic, ^ whether it dealt with the ideal representation of gods and heroes, or any
Nile,
...
or common object." Hirt considered the characterisation of the centaurs in the Parthenon metopes very weak compared with that in later On the other hand, he representations of the same subject. would not believe that the Parthenon pediment sculptures were of the fifth century; he placed them, owing to their great tenderness (" Weichheit") of treatment, in the fourth century, which appeared to him to be the time of highest achievement This curious perversity of judgment, as in Greek sculpture.
mean
Hirt
is
supposed to have been the "Characteristiker" of Goethe's Samm-
ier u. die Seinigen.
196
it
appears to us, arose very naturally from Hirt's intermediate theoretical position, which was in itself untenable, although
an advance on his predecessors. For, accepting with Winckelmann and others the antithesis between beauty and exHirt found the essence of art not in beauty, but in expression, which, by this antithesis, is narrowed down to mean the manifestation of something quite definite in the way Expressiveness of of individuality or action or emotion. this kind is of course to be found in the later art much more decidedly than in that of the Periclean age and as it did not occur to Hirt to analyse "objective beauty" in terms of expressiveness, he was obliged by his theory to prefer, as art, the monuments which really show a beginning of decadence, and to separate from their true context and refer to this later time those productions of the greatest age, in which the expressive force latent within their "objective beauty " partly breaks through its severe self-restraint. As suggesting a contrast to the idea of beauty, however, and forcing it out of its abstraction, his theories and observations were of the very greatest value, and like the romantic rebellion of the Schlegels and others between 1780 and 1800, really represented in the world of ideas that actual growth of material which I have been attempting to describe. It should be observed that previously to this more extended knowledge of ancient sculpture and building a very great part had been played in archaeology by coins and gems, which are more readily brought together in collections than larger plastic works. Such a collection was that of Baron v. Stosch at Florence, which Winckelmann spent nine months in cataloguing. The evidence discussed in Lessing's beautiful little the Ancients Portrayed Death, consisted largely treatise, It is well known that gem-cutting (by a curioua of gems. analogy with epigram- writing ^) was not very active during the great fifth century at Athens, so that here again we see a reason why archaeological interest began with the later time of art, and worked back to the earlier. Enough has been said, I hope, to indicate the sort of progress made in the collection of archaeological material betweert the Renaissance and the time of Kant, and the sort of stimulus which increased knowledge imparted to the theory of art.
pression,
;
How
See above,
p. 86.
ART-CRITICISM.
97
We have
,
art-criticism in the
to say something about the course of literary same period. X. Art-criticism must for this purpose include ._^ _, ^ Art-crltlcism. 1 c on the one hand the appreciative history oi art, and on the other those reflections upon questions concerning beauty, which are not guided by a general speculative interest. Practically, as was observed above, we can only draw the line between this abstract criticism and philosophy proper by excluding from the present section the views of writers who
now
111
are
known
in
philosophy otherwise than by their reflections on
beauty.
i. saw that Sidney's criticism and the r r-i 1 1 Structure of Shakespeare s plays bears witness to an influence derived ultimately from classical tradition, reacting against the formlessness of the earlier drama inherited from the middle age. In the reaction of the French seventeenth-century theatre against Spanish influence we see a
Pierre Comellle.
We
>
action, initiated
phenomenon, but with less happy issues. This reby Malherbe, reached its first culmination in the later plays, and in the dramatic theory, of Pierre Corneille
parallel
(1606- 1 684).
concerned.
It is
chiefly with his theories that
we
are
Towards the close of his life, after fifty years of work for the stage, ^ he wrote three essays on the drama I?e rutiliti et des parties du poeme dramatique, De la TragMie and Des trois unitds, the purpose of which may be fairly stated in the words of the latter, "accorder les regies anciennes avec les agr^ments modernes," an expression closely analogous to that in which Lessing's biographer states the purpose of the Dramaturgie^ " to reconcile the idea of romantic poetry To Corneille, howwith the classical conception of beauty." rules came as a prescription of indubitable authority, ever, the and he scarcely knew that the modifications which he made in applying them were really the first steps to reasoning on
:
s'il se peut, nous accommoder avec amener jusqu'a nous."* The interpreters of Aristotle and Horace have been, he goes on to say, scholars without experience of the theatre, and have|
their
merits.
"II
faut,
elles (les regies)
et les
* * *
Discours de
I'utilitk, etc.
ii.
Lessing's Leben, Danzel,
193.
Discours de PutilitS,
etc.
iqS
history of êsthetic.
therefore thrown little light on their real meaning. He intends to interpret according to his experience of the stage. The similarity between the atmosphere of Corneille's thought and that of Lessing's reflections, which are so often directed against him, can escape no one who has read the Discours and the Dramaturgic. Both are intent on building up a national drama from the foundations. Both
were convinced that a just understanding of Aristotle's rules was the way to set about it. Thoughts and expressions from
Lessing's scholarship indeed is an Armstrong gun to a bow and arrow and in place of the latter's complacent reference almost exclusively to his own plays, Lessing has at command the whole range of ancient and modern drama. Corneille accepts what he takes for Aristotelian dicta as a basis on which, out of his own experience, he tries to enlarge. Lessing contends that his adherence to the supposed dicta is at least valueless, while the supposed enlargements show a real failure to appreciate the depth of Aristotle's conceptions. And, no doubt, when Corneille explains the famous " purification " passage in the Poetics to mean that by the pity and fear which tragedy excites we are led to avoid the passions which led to the misfortunes of the characters represented,^ or when he denies that Aristotle conceived of pity and fear as necessarily interwoven in the same cause of emotion, suggesting that it would do quite well to have the fear without the pity, he falls an easy victim to Lessing's triumphant criticism.* But after all, they were two of a trade and in some respects a reader of to-day cannot but feel that Corneille's difficulties were too summarily disposed of by Lessing, who would never admit that a case could have been omitted by Aristotle. We saw,* for example, in treating of the Poetics, that Aristotle refuses to face the full shock of a tragic collision he will not allow that a thoroughly good man's ruin can be a
to Corneille's as
; ;
Corneille recur in Lessing.
fitting subject for tragedy, Corneille attacks this limitation, as also that which excludes a thoroughly bad man from being the object of tragic interest. And I think that his instinct is right, though his argument is inconclusive. Lessing, who exerts* himself to condemn Weisse's Richard IIL on ground
Dela
Traghdie.
Supra, p. 19.
Dramaturgie, Dramaturgie,
ii.,
Ixxxi.
Ixxxii.
ii.,
THE
" UNITIES."
I99
of the one limitation he has not, so far as I know, applied his view in detail to Shakespeare's play on the same subject defends the other limitation also, saying,^ it is a thoroughly horrible conception that there can be persons who are unhappy without any fault of their own. The heathen put this horrible thought as far from them as possible, and are we to cherish it and to enjoy dramas which confirm it, we whom religion and reason should have convinced that it is no less blasphemous than untrue ? In all this Lessing was the child of his century " not yet liberated by Goethe ";^ I am only pointing out how close is the succession, not absolutely in all respects an advance, from Corneille to him. I cannot but think again that Corneille has the best of it in his criticism of Aristotle's remark, that morals in tragedy ought to be good. ^ And the dramatic writings show the same connection the same abstract characterisation, typical rather than individual ; f.he same submission to the rule of " one day " * and to the comparative unity of place, interpreted much as Corneille interprets it the same ingenious refinements of emotion, which have caused a comparison between Lessing and Lope de Vega,^ but seem rather to indicate the direct connection with Corneille. The reformer is usually deep-dyed with that which he feels the need of reforming, and it is remarkable how powerfully the French seventeenth century worked upon the age of Lessing. Corneille, as we have seen, was not incapable of reasoning upon the supposed rules of classical form. His attitude to the unity of the day is worth noticing, because he defends it, not on the score of formal symmetry, but on the score of imitative " Beaucoup d^clament contre cette regie qu'ils nomrealism. ment tyrannique, et auraient raison, si elle n'^tait fondle que sur mais ce qui la doit faire accepter, c'est la I'autoritd d'Aristote Corneille states his raison naturelle qui lui sert d'appui." *
;
;
Dramaturgie,
Bernays.
l.c.
2 *
See Dramaturgie, ii., Ixxxiii. cannot think it accidental that both Minna v. Barnlielm and Emilia Galotti begin by marking the hour as early morning, so as to give time for
* I
all
^
that has to pass before night. Lessing's Leben, Danzel., ii. 113.
6 " Des trois unites." It is worth noting, as we pass, that a striking sentence of Lessing, which introduces the long discussion on Aristotle and
200
" natural reason " as follows the drama is an imitation or portrait of nature, and is more perfect the more it resembles it now " la representation dure deux heures, et resembleroit
:
parfaitement
si
Taction qu'elle represente ne demanderoit pas
râlit^." In the Cid therefore, we remember, the unhappy hero, having fought a duel one evening, and having been occupied the whole of the ensuing night in repelling a night attack of the enemy, is sent off to fight
davantage pour sa
another duel first thing in the morning, in spite of the reasonable remonstrance of the king, who wants it put off till the morrow but, owing, I imagine, to the imminent end of the theatrical " day," can only obtain for the hero one or two hours' breathing space. Here, no doubt, Comeille mistakes his ground altogether. The law of imitation or portrayal was understood, as we see, far more profoundly than this by Aristotle and experience does not show that the stage can possibly present an unreduced reproduction of two hours taken clean out of ordinary life. Even conversation in a novel is epitomised and reduced a stage letter is written in a few seconds a to its essence stage ball may occupy perhaps an hour from the arrival to the departure of the guests a stage banquet is merely a sample or suggestion of the reality. I imagine that a reduction of scale in the parts is as essential to the drama as to a picture but no doubt there is the further difficulty, as Corneille implies, that large lapses of time at any point in the drama make the reduction altogether disproportioned. The ultimate principle must surely be to avoid shocking the imagination of the spectators and to this he refers, advising, e.g., that considerable lapses of time shall be between the acts, and that notes of time shall be avoided. I do not think there can be any doubt that however mischievous the influence of Cornellle's practice and theory may have been on the French and German theatre, their effect in
; ; ; ; ;
; ;
drawing attention, and especially Lessing's attention, to the antithesis of ancient rules and modern romance was a real
step towards a vital co-ordination of the two.
At any
rate,
Comeille, seems suggested by this passage, which Lessing must then have His words are: " Mit dem Ansehen des Aristoteles werde ich bald fertig werden, wenn ich es nur auch mit seinen Griinden zu
had before him.

werden
wiisste."
THE FRENCH TRADITION.
20I
they show us one great element of the aesthetic atmosphere into which Lessing was born. iiTo realise more completely the force and Fonteneueand
complacency of the tradition thus initiated, we glance for a moment at the life of Corneille by Fontenelle^ (1657-1757). short quotation will suffice: "On recommenca alors k ^tudier le thd^tre des anciens, et a soup9onner qu'il pouvait y avoir des regies." " Les regies du poeme dramatique, inconnues d'abord et m^prisdes, quelque temps apres combattues, ensuite regues a demi et sous des Mais conditions, demeurent enfin maitresses du theatre.
Voltaire.
may
r^poque de I'dtablissement de
leur empire n'est
qu'au temps de Cinna" (1640). Corneille's Discours de I'utiliid,

I'unite
We
etc.
may add
:
to this
proprement from
"
II
faut observer
de jour, personne n'en doute," with Voltaire's note, " On en doutaient tellement du temps de Corneille que ni les Anglais ni les Espagnols ne connurent cette regie. Les Italiens seuls I'observaient. La Sophonisbe de Mairest (i6o4-r688) fut la premiere pi^ce en France ou La Motte, homme de beaucoup ces trois unites parurent. d'esprit et de talent, mais homme a paradoxes, a ^crit de nos mais cette her^sie en litt^rature jours contre ces trois unites n'a pas fait fortune." These quotations from Fontenelle and Voltaire exhibit the continuity of French dramatic tradition from the seventeenth I especially took the opporcentury through the eighteenth. introducing the name of Voltaire, because in his tunity of critical and dramatic activity, the influence of which was brought into the heart of Germany by his relations with Frederick the Great, Lessing found precisely what he wanted I conclude this very slight in the way of an object to attack. reference to the immense field of French criticism, the activity of which can be seen from Corneille's saying * that there were twelve current interpretations of Aristotle's " purification doctrine, with Lessing's racy verdict on the whole dramatic and critical movement of which we have been speaking. "Just the same thing ' happened to the French as to Gottsched [Lessing's forerunner in Germany the comparison is of interest as bringing together the movements which
lieu, et
;
;
de Taction, de
Oeuvres de Pierre Corneille, vol. i. 8 Dramaturgie,
^
ii.
De la
Tragkdie, init.
Ixxxi.
202
Lessing
inherited].
Hardly
had
Corneille
raised
their
theatre a little above barbarism, when they thought it all Racine seemed to them to have put but absolutely perfect. the last touch to it and so there was no question raised whether a tragic poet might not be yet more pathetic and more touching than Corneille and Racine but this was assumed to be impossible, and the aspirations of subsequent poets had to limit themselves to becoming as like one of For a hundred years they have dethese two as possible. themselves, and to some degree their neighbours but luded let any one tell them so, and see what they will say "Of the two it was Corneille who did most harm, and had the most disastrous influence on their tragic poets. For Racine misled them only by example; Corneille both by example and by precept." Another set of materials which entered into iiiThe British Writers. ^^le data of aesthetic, were furnished by the British writers on beauty and art. The chief of these, as distinguished from the philosophers in the strict sense, were Burke, Lord Kaimes, Hogarth, and Reynolds, of whom the first three exercised a traceable influence on the German movement, while the latter is of interest as championing the idea of the characteristic in a peculiar sense, intermediate between beauty and expression, and forming to some extent a point of departure for the .author of the Modern Painters. The works of these four writers fall almost within the decade following Baumgarten's first publication of part of the Êsthetic (1750). Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty was published in England in 1753, and a year or two later was translated into German by Mylius, with a preface by Lessing.
;
Sublime and Beautiful was first pubsecond edition was brought out in 1757 and Lessing was long occupied with the project of translating it. Reynolds' papers in the /<aC^r appeared 1758-9, and so far as I am aware were not known in Germany. Lord Kaimes' (Henry Home) Elements of Criticism, appeared in 1 76 1, and was translated into German by Meinhardt, meeting with Lessing's warm approval.'
Burke's Essay on
lished in
1 756
the complete
tJie
My authority as regards
Leben (Danzel).
ing's
that
work
these German translations is in every case Lessprecise references are shown in the Index to under the several authors' names.
The
BURKE AND LORD XAIMES.
203
truth the
To
1758
:
all
the year " Although the writer's principles are not worth much, still his book is uncommonly useful as a collection of all the occurrences and perceptions which the philosophers must assume as indisputable in inquiries of this kind. He has collected all the materials for a good system, which no one is better qualified to make use of than you" {i.e. Mendelssohn).^ may take Burke and Lord Kaimes together, as they have much in common, and then the two artists, whose views are related to each other as complementary opposites. The fundamental point of agreement between Burke and Lord Kaimes. Burke and Lord Kaimes, marking a decided tendency towards a new departure, is the contention carried out by Burke with perverse ingenuity, that the natural exercise of any emotion, even if painful in kind, such as an emotion of terror or of sympathetic distress, is in itself delightful,* or as Lord Kaimes most vehemently states it, a painful emotion, if not abnormally violent, is agreeable upon reflection. This view leads up to important results. ^- In Burke, it is worked out in a doctrine of Bnriie's Purgation Theory. " Exercise necessary for the finer organs:"* according to which as these emotions (pain and terror) "clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome encumbrance, they are capable of producing delight." The resemblance of this conception to the later interpretations of Aristotle's KaOapa-ls is evident, and it makes possible, ^- An exceedingly free treatment of the sublime The Sublime aun tougiiaess. ^s something beside and outside the beautiful. Its connection with beauty, indeed, is, by Burke, far too completely dissolved. It is referred to ideas of pain and danger,* as those which produce the strongest of emotions, being connected as Burke strangely says, with the principle of self-preservation while beauty is referred to ideas of pleasure, which are conIt is well, however, in nected with man's social nature.
criticism
these works we might apply with much made by Lessing on Burke in a letter of
We
1 Lessing's Ze&en, i. 350. 2 Burke distinguishes delight
to in the text, Sublime
and
from pleasure. See for the doctrine referred Beautiful, sect, xiv., and Lord Kaimes' Elements
\
of
Criticism,
3
i.
97.
vi.
Sublime and Beautiful, sect. viL * Sublime and Beautiful, part i, sect.
504
bringing up new matter for theory, not to be backward in affirming its independence of the old and although both Burke and Lord Kaimes followed Longinus and the moderns who had discussed his views,^ yet the recognition of the sublime as co-ordinate with the beautiful indicates the beginning Reconciliaof a great enlargement in aesthetic appreciation. Burke, for instance, is tion of the two opposites comes later, prepared to accept ugliness, although the exact opposite of beauty,^ as partly coinciding with the sublime. This is a most important admission. Many of the qualities in which he finds the sublime, e.g., formlessness, strength, magnitude, are taken up into Kant's treatment of the subject. From the principle of the agreeableness of c. painiui Beauty not Disagreeai)ie.gygn painful emotion, Burke obtains an ingenious reversal' of the time-honoured problem, "Why do we take pleasure in the representation of what is painful to see in reality." The fact is not so, he replies real distress and disaster do not cause pure pain to the spectator, but, as expeFor, considered as rience proves, fascinate and attract him.. emotions, they are " delightful," though painful (as we might say) in content, and a theatre where the best tragedy in the world was being acted in the best way would be emptied at once by an announcement that a state criminal of high rank was about to be executed in the next square.
; ;
as a representafrom its real bearings and interest for, as Burke insists, no normal person wishes for such a real catastrophe as he will run to see when it takes place. So that, by a reverse movement compared with that of Plato, by elevating reality to the rank of an aesthetic semblance, instead of lowering art to the rank of useful reality, we seem to have started the suggestion that reality can be looked at aesthetically if looked at without practical interest, and therefore that the aesthetic temper consists, in part at least, in the absence of such interest. Only, so far as art and fact remain on one level, there is no room for identifying beauty with a deeper reading of fact and Burke, accordingly, is quite clear that
tion,
i.e.
We seem here to have the reality regarded

in abstraction
1 Lord Kaimes alludes to a controversy between Boileau and Huet on the sublimity of the text, " Let there be light," which is referred to by Longinus. 2 Sublime and Beautiful^ sect. xxi. " On Ugliness."
* Sectt. xiv.
and
xv.
BURKE AS FORMALIST.
art has
205
no advantage over nature except that which arises from our pleasure in imitation. d. Other details in these writers are of historical Anticipations of
later Ideas,
interest.
The
quality of grace
is
contrasted with
by Lord Kaimes, probably on a hint from Burke,^ and is described as connected more particularly with motion, and also as peculiar to man. These ideas are fertile
that of dignity
in later German thought, into which they passed pardy through Lessing, who probably derived them from Lord Kaimes.* These two writers, again, do much to suggest the distinction between poetry and painting. Burke quotes the passage of the Iliad, in which Helen's beauty is indicated by the effect of her appearance among the Trojan elders, contrasting ^ it, just in the manner of the Laocoon, which insists on this same passage, with a detailed description of a beautiful woman from Spenser. Poetry, he points out in the following section, is not strictly an imitative art and Lord Kaimes further insists that a picture is confined to a moment of time, and cannoitake in a succession of incidents. Many other details of importance might be noticed in Burke, who has been called materialist in aesthetic, but is rather perhaps in reality a formalist, in the sense that he simply notes as irreducible elements of beauty, certain "properties that operate by nature, and are less liable to be altered by caprice than any others."* He rebels, as Plotinus did, against the identification of beauty with proportion and fitness,* point;
i. 326 ; cf. Sublime and Beautiful, sect, on " Grace." Lessing's Leben, ii. 43. Schiller's Anmuth u. Wiirde is also definitely influenced by a passage in Winckelmann, in which " Grace " is compared to Gesch. d. K., 8. 2. 16. the girdle of Aphrodite. I should assume them to be independent, though the thought is fundamentally the same as in Kaimes and Lessing.
Kaimes,
Sublime and Beautiful ;

S. 22.
sect.
"On
effect of
words."
Cf.
Kaimes, 87 and
Laocoon,
v;
i,
* Sublime and Beautiful,, sect. 18. The most materialistic suggestion in Burke is reproduced, though not as a fundamental principle of aesthetic, by Lessing, when he advises the actor to study the physical effects of passion on the ground that these effects, being well imitated, will tend to arouse the Cf. Sublime and Beautiful, Cause of Pain and Fear passion in question. with Hamburg. Dramat., i. iii. I imagine that modern psychology tends ta support this suggestion.
Sublime and Beautiful. Part III. ii.-vi. " In beauty, the effect is previous to aiiy knowledge of the use." III. vii. Cf. Kant's definition of " Zweckmassigskeit ohne Vorstellung eines Zweckes."
*
206
ing out quite justly that proportion per se is simply a relatior of quantity, and thus "wholly indifferent to the mind" (as judging of beauty). This argument is valuable as urging thai not every proportion, and therefore not proportion as such, but in pushing it to the limit of maintainconstitutes beauty ing that in beauty there is no specially subtle orderliness, he
;
seems to be denying what he ought to be investigating, anc to be turning his back on his own important suggestions ol the value of gradation or variation, and of variation of variation.^
Lastly, it is important to note that Lord Kaimes anticipates Lessing in pointing out the connection ^ between the unities of time and place, and the continuity of representation and uninterrupted presence of the chorus in Greek drama, and makes this an argument for greater freedom on the modern stage, while always demanding a certain economy of the
spectator's imagination. I do not wish it to be inferred from the space which I have devoted to these two critical writers, that I consider them to be aesthetic thinkers of a high rank, or that I desire to pull down Lessing from his eminence by the perpetual indication
of his debt to them. The enumeration of details and I have enumerated but a fraction of what well deserve to be mennecessarily occupies more space than the statement tioned of a single philosophical doctrine of the very first importance. But in history we must have details and to me at least the concentration of influences from all quarters in the microcosm of a great intellect is one of the most fascinating problems Lessing that can be put before a historian of philosophy. himself knew well what his genius owed to his learning especially he sympathised with the English mind, and to be well acquainted with the English literature was to win his warm commendation. ^' Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty was pubHoKarth. lished, as we saw, three years before Burke's Enquiry, and Hogarth is mentioned, with an approving reference to his " line of beauty," in Part IIL, sect. xiv. of the The Analysis was enthusiastically welcomed latter work.
1 3 *
Variation, why beautiful" ? Sublime and Beautiful. Elements of Criticism, 2. ch. 23. "The Three Unities."
Lessing's Zeien,
ii.
5.
THE LINE OF BEAUTY.
^0^
by Leasing in the Vossische Zeitung in 1754.^ We maycon veniently attach our account of Hogarth to Lessing's appreciation of him. In the review of 1754 (written when Lessing was only 25), he greets Hogarth's ideas as a new light on the whole material of art, as a system calculated to reduce to certainty men's conflicting ideas as to what is pleasing, and to abolish the wretched proverb that there is no disputing about tastes, "and as likely to make the term beauty suggest as much in the way of thought as it has
hitherto suggested in the way of feeling." Later, however, in the preface to the German translation of Hogarth's work, Lessing lays his finger on the point of difficulty in its conception, viz. the question of determining, on general grounds, the degree and kind of curvature that constitutes beauty of line. For Hogarth " represents ^ in his first plate a number of undulating lines, of which he only takes one to merit the name of beautiful, namely that which is curved neither too much nor too little." Lessing had an idea that a mathematical investigation might solve the difficulty, which finds no answer beyond an appeal to unanalysed exarnples in Hogarth himself, whose idea was suggested to him by a remark ascribed It is worth while to distinguish, accordto Michael Angelo. view which I have adopted throughout, the two ing to the elements of the problem, which Hogarth himself industriously If the question is, whether, as a simple geometriconfuses. cal form, one line is more beautiful than other lines, this is a legitimate problem, and can be answered, within certain limits, so long as the effects of suggestive representation are And from this point of view it is of the greatest excluded. interest to contrast Hogarth's idea of the undulating and spiral line with Plato's conception of the most beautiful form For here we have the as the straight line or the circle.' antithesis of ancient and modern reduced to terms of the So far as Hogarth has any general ancient or formal theory. conception it is still the " one in the many " that he believes to be beauty ; but with him it is the " intricacy," the " continuity
1 Lessing's Leben, ii. 22. Schasler must have been misled by some misprint into supposing Hogarth's work to have been published in 1763, and
Why he put Burke's Enquiry after Lord Kaimes' so after the Enquiry. Elements, in opposition to his own dates, I cannot imagine. * Lessing, in the Leben, 223, note. 3 See p. 33 above.
208
of variety" rather than the element of unity, which is the side. He even appeals to pure decorative design in support of this idea, describing in striking language the pleasure afforded him by the " stick and ribbon ornament, which he compares with that of watching a country dance. This pure decoration, without very complex representative suggestion, is the true sphere of pure formal or geometrical beauty and had he sought to apply his theory within this more abstract region, he might have laid a firm analytic foundation for aesthetic inquiry. As it is, he stands alone, I think, among eighteenth century writers in even alluding to this great branch of art, which presents the problems of beauty in their simplest and most general form. But going at once to the most complex of all sesthetic problems, that of the beauty of the human figure, in which suggestions of character, intellect, passion, are inextricably intermingled, he loses his way, or rather, makes no progress at all in the attempt to reduce its wealth of meaning to any one formal type or principle, and does not even attempt to show within what limits his serpentine line the line made by twisting a wire evenly round a cone has that degree of continuity in variety which constitutes the beautiful. The fact is, that these lower or more abstract grades of expressive form are liable to have their significance overridden by the more complex suggestions connected with life and character, and it is not an axiom that a beautiful human figure can be constructed out of forms all of which have independently the highest geometrical beauty. Thus Hogarth's analysis of beauty, drawn from formative art only, represents the abstract principle of unity in variety on its highest level, so as to form a point of transition to the analysis of the present century, which finds a characteristic significance in curves, for example, which vary progressively. It is against him that Burke is arguing when he disputes the importance of proportion and fitness in accounting for beauty. It is a fact both of interest and of importance that Hogarth's undulating line supplied Goethe with a name for the tendency which he ranks as the polar opposite of the characteristic, when representing in a scheme ^ the extreme inclinations of artists,
more important
Dtr Sammler
u. die Seinigen.
BEAUTY AS THE AIM OF NATURE.

and the
art.
209
central combination in which alone they produce true remarkable that in his artistic practice Hogarth himself pursues the characteristic beyond the border of ugliness.
It is
Eeynoids
'''*
Reynolds' three papers in the Idler iov 1759,
which form the point of departure for the chapter in Modern Painters, " Touching the Grand Style," ^ seem to be in more ways than one determined by opposition to Hogarth. "The flowing line, which constitutes grace and beauty," and the "pyramidal principle "* are satirised in the first pages. And though the satire is not serious in tone, being directed against silly connoisseurship and not against any genuine theory, yet the reference in this paper to a Vandyck portrait of Charles I., which the self-styled connoisseur refuses to admire, as a " perfect representation of the character as well as the figure of the man," prepares the way This, although fairly for Reynolds' own account of beauty. Ruskin's criticism in as far as it derives our pleasure open to in beauty from mere custom, suggests an actual ground for the force of custom in this province, which Ruskin does not " Every species of the animal as well as the vegetable notice. creation may be said to have a fixed or determinate form towards which Nature is continually inclining, like various lines terminating in the centre or it may be compared to pendulums vibrating in different directions over one central point and as they all cross the centre though only one passes through any other point, so it will be found that perfect beauty is It is true that oftener produced by nature, than deformity." ^ Reynolds doubts whether one species is (as we should say) objectively more beautiful than another ; but he is clear that " in creatures of the same species, beauty is the medium or centre of all various forms." Here then we have an intermediate position. Specific characterisation is set against geometrical formalism on the one
;
Vol.
iii.
ch. I.
at Hogarth are the words in No. 82 : " but if he pretends to defend the preference he gives to one or the other (swan or dove) by endeavouring to prove that this more beautiful form proceeds from a particudirection of a line. . lar gradation of magnitude, undulation of a curve, or he will find at last that the great Mother of Nature will not be subjected to
2
More clearly aimed
such narrow rules." Idler, No. 82.
2IO
HISTORY or
iESTIIETIC.
hand, and individual characterisation on the other, and constitutes, historically speaking, a point of transition between the " two. shall see that even for Goethe the " characteristic has some affinity with the specific type, and is opposed, in a way which strikes us as strange, to the intensified rendering of individual attributes. Plainly, the movement of natural science has played a part in the transformation of this conception. Reynolds evidently thinks that a central or average I form in each species represents the purpose of nature. suppose that if we to-day could attach any meaning to a purpose or inclination of nature, we should interpret it dynamically, and should regard it as likely to be ahead of any existing individual forms, or at any rate as various, and incapable of exhausThis influence tion within a single typical or central figure. must obviously force forward our conception of central or essential reality from the species to the individual, and from the " invariable " to the law of variation, which is itself a kind of invariable. Finally it is a curious anticipation of the German " period of genius " that Reynolds contends for the rights of genius against the tendency, exemplified in Hogarth, to attach practical importance to critical rules. In all these in Hogarth's development of antique formalism, in Burke's acceptance of the sublime as a complement to the beautiful, and in his revolt against the worship of mere proportion, in Lord Kaimes' admission of the painful within the sphere of the agreeable, and his desire to emancipate the modern drama from the rigid unities of space and time, and in Reynolds' effort to dissociate the grand style from decorative formalism, and explain it with reference to a normal or ceiitral " inclination of nature " expressed by specific characterisation in all this we find embodied the antithesis of abstract and concrete expressiveness, forced upon the modern world by the mere fact of its contrast with the ancient, and especially with the very abstract tradition by which that ancient world was represented to it. iv. have now very briefly to trace the conoermaiiB tefore Lessingr. flicting elements in which this same contrast of ancient rule and modern expressiveness existed in Germany, before it was resolved into a vital and progressive aesthetic by Lessing and his contemporaries. The time the early eighteenth century was in Germany one of immense and varied activity, in which foreign
We
We
A GERMAN DRAMA,
material, both
priated,
211
French and English, was being eagerly approand was producing strangely diverse effects on the
inexperienced genius of the nation. The few observations by which I shall try to focus this animated scene as a background for the representation of Lessing's and Winckelmann's aesthetic achievements will be, even more than the rest of this work, devoid of all claims to full historical adequacy, and will merely select those leading and causal tendencies which bear directly on the growth of aesthetic perception. The two great critical problems which Lessing inherited from the generation immediately before him were, a, The relation of a German national drama to the pseudo-classical French theatre, and consequently to the true mind of antiquity which this latter parodied this was the essential subject of his Dramaturgic ; and ^8, The value of strictly descriptive or pictorial poetry, a species of art which marked both the classical decadence and the first flush of the modern sentimental interest in nature, and which seemed to be justified by the voice of antiquity, and by a misunderstanding of the tradition that art lay in the imitation of natural objects. The relation between poetic and pictorial beauty is the subject of the Laocoon. The former question is chiefly connected at this epoch with the latter with the poetry and the name of Gottsched theories of Bodmer and Breitinger, the " Swiss " or the I will speak of these two sects, as in fact they Zurich critics. were, very shortly, with reference to these problems. a. Gottsched ( 1 700-1 766) was lecturing at LeipGottBchod. gj^ jj^ J ^^g^ when Lessing matriculated there, both on the History of Philosophy, using as a text-book his own Elements, which is said to have been a Wolffian
;
compendium, and on " Poetik, ad
critices sanioris
normam,"
" the art of poetry in conformity with a sounder critiHe represented in Germany a similar reaction cism." ^ against utter formlessness in the drama, to that which we have observed to take place both in England and in France. He set himself the task of creating a German literature, and more especially a German drama, worthy to rank with that In attempting this, with the whole weight of other nations. of his position at Leipzig, then a leading literary centre, of
1 Lessing's Leben,
L 51.
212
extreme industry, both on his own part and on that of his circle, in original writing, in translation, and in journalism, and of his friendship with an important society of actors (Neuber's), who accepted the new plays in French taste which he prescribed, and were imitated in their submission by the ordinary travelling companies, he succeeded for good or evil in banishing the coarse and wild popular dramas of the later seventeenth century with the clown and the Faust, and replacing them by plays of French origin, or on French models, representing the ideas of classical taste and correctness then current The Deutsche SchaubUhne (1740in the literary world. 1 745) was the collection of plays, both original and translated, which he issued as an instrument of his enterprise.^ Lessing, who relied on the Greeks and on Shakespeare as his guides in dramatic questions, appears to have condemned this interruption of German development by French influence " No one will deny," a contemas a wholly false departure. porary periodical had alleged,* " that the German stage owes a great part of its earlier improvements to Professor Gott" I am that no one," rejoins Lessing " I deny it sched." altogether. It were to be wished that Gottsched had never meddled with the theatre. His supposed improvements either concern the most utter trifles, or are actually changes for the worst. He did not," Lessing continues, " aim at improving the ancient German theatre, but at creating a new And what sort of a new one ? Why, a Frenchified one. one without considering whether this Frenchified drama was
;
;
German mind." Lessing's biographers, exceedingly careful students of the German eighteenth century, do not assent to this extreme: Admitting that there was a natural kinship between view. the great English dramatists and the popular German drama of the seventeenth century, they yet deny that the latter could of itself have developed into a true national dramatic literature cognate with that of England, On the contrary, they maintain with great show of reason that Lessing's conception of his problem, to establish a national theatre on the principles, of Aristotle and Shakespeare, only became possible after, and because of, the work of Gottsched in bringing the Germaa drama into some kind of literary form.'
suitable to the
1
Encyl. Brit,
'
art.
" Gottsched."
i.
Lessing's Leben,
i.
439.
Lessing's Leben,
103, 438-7.
A GERMAN DRAMA.
213
It must further be remarked that Gottsched, in his anxiety to prove that there was, and therefore could be, a German drama, and to bring all influences to bear upon remodelling it, called attention to the older plays, of whose form he entirely disapproved, by his historical notices of them in the
" Nothiger Vorrath zur Geschichte der Deutschen dramatischen Dichtkunst " (materials for a history of German dramatic poetry), and both himself, and through his wife, an indefatigable authoress and translator, brought much of real value to the knowledge of the German public. Thus Madame Gottsched translated Moliere's Misanthrope, the whole of the English Spectator, and Pope's Rape of the Lock. Of Gottsched's dramatic theorising I give a single specimen, from his rules for the construction of a tragic plot.^ " The poet selects a moral doctrine, which he desires to impress upon his readers in a sensuous form. For this purpose he devises the general framework of a story, such as to exhibit the truth of the doctrine. Then he searches in history for famous persons to whom incidents occurred somewhat similar to those of his story, and borrows their names for the personages of his plot in order to give them distinction." Leasing remarks on this that if the Hercules Furens contains any such doctrine, it must either be that virtue and heroism are an increased provocation to an angry Deity, or that one should avoid being a natural son of Zeus if one wants to Lessing seems always just escape the persecution of Hera. a little too clever. Even the English reader, if he knows Browning's translation of the Heracles, especially the chorus " Even a dirge," will be inclined to demur to the substance of Lessing's criticism no less than to the form of Gottsched's Yet Lessing himself retained throughout, and prescription. in some degree bequeathed even to Goethe, the pseudo-classical and moralistic traditions of Corneille and Gottsched. And it is necessary to express a very serious doubt whether the enterprise in which not only Gottsched, but Lessing, Schiller and Goethe spent the best of their strength, the establishment of a German national drama, can be held to have thoroughly succeeded. Whether Faust is a sufficient reward to the world for the labours of several great men through two-thirds of a century, might well be questioned, if
1
Gottsched, Kritische Dichtkunst, quoted in Lessing's Lebm,
i.
184.
214
it
were worth while to quarrel with the course of history. of their labours, it may be held, was great inThe real German deed, but was not what they sought. national art, the art of music, grew up of itself behind their backs while they were arguing about painting and poetry. What they did create by their deep and energetic study of the best utterances of mind and the best thoughts about those utterances, was not German art, but German philosophy. ^ ^^^ "Swiss" critics and poets Bodmer and The" Swiss." Breitinger, almost exactly Gottsched's contemporaries, with their friends and partisans, represent an influence on the whole opposed to that of Gottsched. In them the meeting of extremes, the sense of a unity between ancient and modern life, which was the sign of a deeper criticism and truer sense of beauty, began to show itself, though in a weak and superficial form, which gives a faint augury of the age of Goethe. Wieland, 1733-18 13, who in his youth was a friend of the Swiss,* and who lived to be satirized by Goethe, may be taken as a measure of the difference between the culture of the two periods. The Swiss critics stood up for Homer, Milton, Ariosto,^ against Gottsched's pseudo-classicism, which allied itself, as a mechanical system of rules, with a narrow rational-
The outcome
ism,
attacking, for example,
the use of the marvellous in
interest which gave them this power of sympathy with really great art, attracted them also to a modern type of poetry which though great things came of it afterwards, at first declared itself with a good deal of confusion in its aims. Sentimentalism, such as that of Klopstock,' whom the Zurich critics had influenced, and in whom they at first believed, and the interest in peasant life and romantic scenery, came together in their minds. Pictorial poetry was stimulated by Thomson's Seasons, which Brocker * was translating between 1 740 and 1 750, and was commended by them in theory," and produced, after Haller, by Kleist (Friihling, 1749) and Gessner (Idylls, 1756) who was a
Homer and Milton. The openness of
painter as well as poet.

Scherer, Scherer, * Scheres, * Scheref,
*
" ^
ii.
ii.
41.
24
31. 38.
Lessing's Leben,
ii.
18.
ii. ii.
In Breitinger's Dichtkunst, Lessing's Leben,
ii.
i8.
SUCCESSORS OF THE SWISS.
215
In speaking of Archaeology I referred to the works of Spence and Caylus, which betray the idea that the difference of medium between painting and poetry makes no serious difference in the scope of those two arts, and this conception appears to have been generally current in the age before
Lessing, although
it
found special expression
in
the criticism
and poetry of the Zurich circle. The Laocoon, it is said, was aimed primarily at the Swiss,^ as the Drantaturgie at Gottsched, Corneille, Voltaire we have only to modify this by remembering that Winckelmann himself was at first a disciple of the Swiss, and that in his early work " on the imitation of Greek painting and sculpture" (1755) he actually says " that the limits of painting may be as wide as those of poetry, and that it is possible for the painter to follow the
;
poet, just as
it
is
for the musician.*
Certainly, as Lessing's
biographer observes, it sounds very much as if this sentence had suggested the second title of the Laocoon, " Of the limits of poetry and painting." Before passing on, however, we must note that the Swiss genius, and the impulse of Thomson's poetry, were not exhausted in the crude thought and fancy that helped to elicit the Laocoon. Rousseau (171 2- 1778) and De Saussure ( 1 7401799) inherited the same genius in more powerful forms. The antagonism of Rousseau and Voltaire reproduces on a higher level that of Breitinger and Gottsched and Rousseau It is the true inaugurator of modern romantic naturalism. seems worth while to illustrate the many-sided influence of Rousseau outside revolutionary politics by a quotation from Amiel, himself too a native of Geneva. "J. J. Rousseau is It was he who founded travelling an ancestor in all things. on foot before Topffer, reverie before Ren6, literary botany before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de St. Pierre, the democratic theory before the revolution of
;
discussion and theological discussion before and Renan, the science of teaching before PestaMirabeau lozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure." " Nobody, again, has had more influence than he upon the nineteenth century, for Byron, Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael and George Sand all descend from him.'
1789, political
Lessing's Lehen.
*
Quoted Lessing's Leben,

Intivte,
ii.
20.
Amiel, Journal
E. Tr.,
i.
202.
2l6
If
Rousseau was the first nature-sentimentalist, De Saussure, also a native of Geneva, was the first student-mountaineer. We can hardly realise to-day the void of knowledge and feeling in the time before 1787, when Mont Blanc was ascended by De Saussure, and also by another traveller, having never, it appears, been ascended before. In De Saussure, as all readers of the Modern Painters are aware, we have an influence that has operated powerfully in impressing on the modern sense of Alpine beauty its peculiar character of loving and penetrating study, which involves the reconciliation of the scientific and artistic spirit, and is the root of our singular delight in observant sympathy with the characteristic law and essence of mountain conformation. V. I am convinced that Lessing ought to be Leasing:. treated in the history of aesthetic before Winckelmann, and not in the reverse order, which Schasler adopts. The mere dates of their lives and writings are not decisive. Winckelmann was indeed born twelve years before Lessing, and his assassination took place thirteen years before Lessing's It is also true that Lessing's Laocoon takes its text death. from an early work of Winckelmann, and mentions before its close his greater and later work, the history of ancient But yet Lessing, as we have seen, springs from plastic art. what went before him, from literary and dramatic criticism, and the conflict of the quasi-classical with the romantic drama which had been observed in the sixteenth century by Sidney, and throughout the seventeenth had been a subject of European interest. Lessing uses Winckelmann, it is true, but not rather as a recogas a younger man uses his predecessors
'
;
nised authority defines his position with reference to the ideas of a contemporary whose starting-point is other than his own. The historical side of Winckelmann's work, the recognition of variety and relativity in the beautiful of formative art, is as good as unknown to Lessing, whose capacity, and consequently his appreciation, lay entirely in the region of literature.
on the other hand, made a new deparwhich connects itself rather with what came after him It is true that he could not have than with what went before. any of Lessing's more important works before his own seen
ture,
*
Now Winckelmann,
See especially Modern Painters,
iv.
402.
LESSINGS POSITION.
217
were writteiiw But his interest was pre-occupied with study in a different sphere, and Lessing's influence could not greatly
have helped, though it might have hindered him. Practically, he possesses in the field of plastic art all that Lessing could in that region, have suggested to him, and he adds more
to
it.
short, represented an earlier tradition, and by Winckelmann's great work, which came to him when his views were completed. Winckelmann represented a new departure on parallel, but different lines, and so far as we can judge, would not have written otherwise than he did if he had lived ten or twenty years later, and been well
Lessing,
in
profited
little
acquainted with the Laocoon. Therefore continuity of subject is better preserved by dealing with Lessing first and Winckelmann second and the chronological relations of the two writers do not amount to a contradiction of this arrangement, which is further justified by the superior concreteness of Winckelmann's analysis as compared with that of Lessing. It must be understood that I can only speak of Lessing's His theological contributions to the material of aesthetic. and semi-philosophical writings do not concern us here, except in as far as they may have strengthened some particular elements of his critical influence. Lessing ( 1 729-1 781) holds an intermediate His Conception of criticiBm. position between the practical and the philosophi;
cal critic
between the legislator for art, and the investiga; No one man in modern times has done more of beauty. tor than he to show the futility of art-formulae uncritically accepted
from tradition, and to substitute for them that living insight which reveals the common root of human nature in the classical He as in the romantic world. And yet he believed in rules. He thought that believed that the critic was the poet's guide. the true laws of poetry were embodied in Homer and Sophoand in withstanding the cles, and explained in Aristotle formlessness of the " age of genius," he did not appear to distinguish obedience to critical rules from practical training Thus he strikes us throughout as attached in artistic forms. to the older views by the purpose of his thought, if he belongs It is worth while to set to modern criticism by its content. this essential point in a clear light at starting, by quoting the famous self-estimate from the closing chapter of his dramatic
;
2l8
criticism, the
Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767-8), almost
his latest strictly aesthetic production. "I am ' neither actor nor poet. the honour of acknowledging me to
My friends
often
be the because they mistake me. So indulgent a conclusion should not be drawn from some dramatic attempts on which I have ventured. Not every one is a painter who takes a brush in The earliest of those his hand, and daubs with colours. attempts were written at an age when one so readily takes enjoyment and facility for genius all that is tolerable in the later pieces I am well aware that I owe simply and solely to criticism. I do not feel in myself the living spring which I have to rises by its own power in pure and abundant jets I should be press everything out of myself by force-pumps. so poor, so cold^ so shortsighted, if I had not learned in some degree to borrow others' wealth, to warm myself at others' fire, and to strengthen my eyes with the lenses of art. Therefore I have always been vexed or ashamed when I have heard anything in disparagement of criticism. They say it chokes genius I flattered myself that it had given me something I am a cripple, who cannot that comes very near genius. possibly be edified by a satire against crutches. " But, no doubt, though crutches help a cripple to move from place to place, yet they do not make him a runner and [After repeating that it is just so with criticism." he has been a student of dramatic form], " but one may study oneself deeper into error. What assures me that I have not done so, and that I do not mistake the essence of dramatic art, is the fact that I understand it precisely as Aristotle has abstracted it from the innumerable masterpieces of the I do not hesitate to confess (even if in Greek stage. these enlightened times I am to be laughed out of countenance for it) that I hold the Poetics to be as infallible as the elements Its principles are just as true and as certain, only of Euclid. not so simple, and therefore more exposed to misrepresentaEspecially I believe that I can prove with reference to tion. tragedy, the account of which is preserved to us pretty complete, that it cannot move a step from Aristotle's direction without departing from its own perfection in the same measure." French tragedy, he goes on to say, had long
latter.
;
do me But only
...
'
Hamburgische Dramaturgie,
ii.
101-104.
LESSING ON CORNEILLE.
219
;
passed for the embodiment of the ancient rules and then, genuine feeling being awakened by some English pieces which obviously broke the French rules, the German public
to the other extreme, and thought these rules were needless and perhaps injurious. "And even this might have passed but they began to confuse all rules with these rules, and to set it down as pedantry to prescribe to genius at all what it may do and what it may not. In short, we were on the point of presumptuously forfeiting all the experience of the past, and of demanding that every poet should invent the art
went
anew
"
I
for himself.
should be vain enough to think that I had deserved well of our theatre if I could suppose that I had hit upon the only means of arresting this fermentation of our taste. At least I may flatter myself that I have worked to this end, for I have studied nothing so much as to attack the illusion of the regularity of the French stage. No nation has misunderstood the rules of the ancient drama more than the French. Some incidental remarks which they found in Aristotle about the most convenient arrangement of the drama, they have assumed to be essential and on the other hand have so emasculated what really was essential by all kinds of limitations and interpretations, that such views could, inevitably, give rise only to works that must remain far below the highest effect which the philosopher had reckoned on in his rules. " I venture at this point to make an assertion which you may take as you please. Show me the piece of the great Corneille, which I would not improve upon.^ What will you bet ? " Yet no I should not like this assertion to pass for braggadocio. So note carefully what I add to it. I certainly should improve upon the play and yet be a long way from being a Corneille and be a long way from having achieved a masterpiece. I certainly should improve upon it, and ought not to think much of myself for doing so. I should have done nothing but what anyone could do whose faith in Aristotle is cis firm as mine." Now we have to bear in mind that it is at least open to doubt whether the form of art about which Lessing's practical interest was thus pre-occupied had not already, at the time
;
1 " Besser machen." play on the same story.
think
it
means not " amend," but
write a better
230
when he was writing, become a matter of merely historical concern. Granting that Shakespearian tragedy falls within it, as Lessing vehemently contended, it must still be held, as I suggested above, that there was not in Lessing's lifetime, and never has been since in any country of Europe, a continuous and considerable development of serious drama, which, while capable of maintaining itself on the stage, has also entered into It may be that the spirit the greater literature of the world. of the Poetic applies to the novel, and to serious comedy, and to Wagnerian opera, and to the mixed realistic drama of our own day, in short to all imaginative narration and portrayal of life. I am not at present discussing this substantive problem, but merely pointing out that neither in its Hellenic nor in its Shakespearian shape was the precise species of art which to Lessing is so present and vital an interest, apparently destined to revive. His tone would have been entirely different, and his judgment of Corneille probably much more lenient, had he realised that the problem before him was one of history, involving gradation and at least external variation, and not of the practical resuscitation of a definite kind of play. This difference between Lessing's actual position and that in which he believed himself to be placed, explains to us at once the nature and limits of his achievement. He never understood his own function to be primarily that of unveiling the true connection between the modern and the antique in literature. Everywhere the thought of the drama, especially of tragedy, as a species of art that has unique value, and is about to come to its rights, is in the background of his treatment. This is the case even in the Laocoon so much so, that it was his intention ^ to have closed the treatise with a discussion that should have established the drama to be the highest form of poetry, and his definition of poetry as having action for its object-matter is contributory to this view (Action = " Handlung" = ^/)a;*a), although action at its widest may include for him anything that goes on in time.
;
that "the Swiss" with Thomson, were introducing pictorial description into poetry, while Winckelmann in the early work which furnishes Lessing's text had declared for
Aim
of the Laoooon:
^-
If
now we
recall
their friends, following
allegory as the highest purpose of formative

1
art,
we can very
Scherer, E. Trans.,
ii.
68.
OCCASION OF THE LAOCOON.
221
easily appreciate the main contention of the treatise which has for its title " Laocoon, or, of the limits of painting and poetry." Its aim was in short to expel pictorial description from poetry, and to deny to formative art any direct concern with action, and therefore with expression or significance. The writer's aim was no doubt impartial,, and the limits of
poetry were to be straitened in accordance with the same principle which was to cut off large provinces from the dominion of " painting " (formative art). And yet it is the case that Lessing, from the mere tendency of his genius, on the whole took the side of poetry, as Winckelmann did that of painting and sculpture, while Lessing left the idea of the latter arts in undeveloped abstraction, and Winckelmann did nothing for the theory of the former. The achievement of each, in his sphere, was nothing less than passing from the abstract to the concrete, recognising that beauty is an utterance which has many grades and forms, and facing the question of the relation
between them and the
possibility of their
combination.
The occasion of the Laocoon was such as to show with a force amounting to irony, the superior importance of ideas as compared with particular facts. Winckelmann had said, in his treatise On the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture, that the expression in Greek statues always revealed a great and composed soul, and that this was illustrated by the famous Laocoon group, in which Laocoon' features expressed no such extremity of suffering as would be realistically in accordance with the situation, and more particularly, did not indicate him to be crying out, as Virgil Lessing, aroused, as he admits,^ by the imdescribes him. plied censure on Virgil, maintains that the absence of agonised expression in Laocoon's features, and of all sign of outcry which he completely accepts as a fact * is to be accounted for not by the demands of Greek character, but by the laws of Greek sculpture in other words, that portrayal of extreme suffering and its expression, legitimate in poetry, was prohibited by the law and aim of beauty, which he alleged to-
be supreme
*
in formative art.
Laocoon, i. Lessing had of course never seen the original of the Laocoon, when this was written. I do not know that he had ever seen a cast ; probably his judgment was formed from engravings.
*
222
the tendency of skilled criticism ever since Lessing's to deny the alleged fact that Laocoon is represented in the marble group as silent or nearly so, and with an expression far removed from that of extreme bodily suffering.^ The truth appears to be that the group is a work of the Rhodian school, which retained little of the great Greek style, and was chiefly distinguished by technical skill and forcible presentation of ideas.^ The expression of pain is violent, and the abstinence from crying out is exceedingly doubtful. It is remarkable that the observation with reference to which such influential theories were propounded, should be of questionable accuracy. have to bear in mind both that the real basis of a tolerable theory is always wider than the case selected for exposition, and also that a statue which seems almost un- Hellenic when compared with the marbles of the Parthenon, might appear full of Greek dignity when compared with works by the degenerate successors of Michael
Now
day has been
We
Angelo. Passing from the occasion, which has an interest chiefly for curiosity, to the substance of Lessing's criticism, we find it to be introduced as follows. Winckelmann had treated the comparative calmness which he saw in the features of Laocoon as the expression of a great and composed soul which, in conformity with the Greek spirit, was above giving way to suffering. Lessing replied, appealing triumphantly to the example of Philoctetes, which Winckelmann had unwarily adduced, that it was not the fact that a great soul was held, among the Greeks, to be incapable of violent expressions of emotion and that therefore the reason for the dignity or self-control apparent in the Laocoon must be other than that alleged by Winckelmann. And this reason, he continued, lay not in any form or law of expression relative to character, but simply in the demands of [formal] beauty, which he asserted to be sovereign in the province of formative art. Now between him and Winckelmann there was so far no very grave matter at issue. For Winckelmann's "expression " is always relative to that which it expresses and the expression of " a great and tranquil soul," which he divines to belong to the greatest period of Greek art, is for him almost or quite within the lines of formal beauty. But for
;
;
Overbeck,
ii.
281.
Murray,
ii.
369.
LESSINGS STYLE.
223
Lessing this is a matter of principle. It is not any particular degree of expression, but the acceptance of expression as a principle of formative art, against which he feels bound to make war. Beauty and expression are for him incompatible, and the one can only exist at the expense of the other. Some feeling of the same kind will be found also in Winckelmann, who does not avoid inconsistency in explaining it away. y- Lessing, however, does not rest in a preDomarcattonof "Patoting" and conception of this kind. He deduces the dis tinction between poetry and " painting " from the nature of their respective media, and in doing so, undoubtedly, as Mr. Sully observes,^ he pioneers the true road of modern aesthetic. And he makes an advance, it must once for all be
'
and method as by his results. a man of the understanding, in the technical sense ascribed to the latter term by idealist philosophy, that is to say, a man of sharp antitheses, the sides of which are not explained in terms of one another, but are simply left as ultimate contrasts. In the first place, however,
noted, as
his style
much by
He
has been
called, indeed,
bear in mind that we are speaking of the daia of and a clear statement of positive empirical contrasts And in the second is no bad thing in a collection of data. place the true distinction of understanding and of reason is of course one of degree rather than of kind antitheses, as we have seen throughout, were laid upon the men of this age
aesthetic,
;
;
we must
but the attempt to reduce things to a principle is always the beginning of reconciliation and unity, and this attempt was
His style, then, shows the man of characteristic of Lessing. His positive knowledge understanding at his very best. the in the field of literature is immense ; his skill in disputation is extraordinary, and this skill is in fact his great temptation, for he cannot resist proving the contradictory of every proposition which an opponent sets up, with a precision which But with all this his style has a is too good to be true. conversational simplicity and directness, which produces an indescribably invigorating effect on the mind, and has someHe seems thing of the touch of modern science at its best. Here are the to say to the reader, " Is it thus or thus ?
examples
Is
it
come and look at them not thus rather than thus ?"
;
how do they strike you ? Of course, when such a
Eneyd.
Brit., art. " Esthetic."
224
writer does force a distinction, the impression is proportionately painful. But these cases are rare, though they unquestionably occur. His peculiar style loses terribly by translation but I feel bound to reproduce the passage which is the core of the Laocoon, both as an example of his reasoning, and as containing, in a page of print, his whole essential contribution to the classification of the arts. " I should like to attempt to deduce the matter from its primary ground.^ " I infer thus. If it is true that painting employs in its imitations quite different media or signs from poetry, the former employing shapes and colours in space, the latter articulate tones in time ; if it is unquestionable that the signs must have a convenient relation to the thing signified, then co-existing signs can only express objects which co-exist or whose parts co-exist, and successive signs can only express objects which are successive, or whose parts are successive. " Objects which co-exist or whose parts co-exist are called bodies. Consequently bodies with their visible qualities are the proper objects of painting. " Objects which are in succession, or whose parts are in succession are called actions. Consequently actions are the proper objects of poetry. " But bodies exist not only in space, but also in time. They continue, and in every moment of their continuance may
;
appear different, and be in different combinations. Each of these momentary appearances and combinations is the effect of a preceding one, and is capable of being the cause of a succeeding one, and thus, so to speak, the centre of an action. Consequently, painting is able also to imitate actions, but only by suggestion conveyed through bodies, " On the other hand, actions cannot exist apart, but must be attached to beings. In as far as these beings are bodies, or are regarded as bodies, poetry can depict bodies too, but only by suggestion conveyed through actions.
" Painting, in its co-existing compositions, can only use a single moment of the action, and must therefore choose the
most pregnant one, from which the preceding and subsequent ones become most intelligible.
'
Laocoon,
sect, xvi.
SUCCESSION AND COEXISTENCE.
225
"Just SO poetry in its successive imitations can only use a single property of bodies, and must therefore select that which awakens the most sensuous image of the object in the
singleness of pictorial epithets, bodily objects." into this brief and pregnant very various sources. The "convenient relation of signs to the thing signified" is probably suggested by Baumgarten.^ The remark that poetry is not adapted for the complete description of visible bodies is due to Burke.^ The observation that painting can represent
aspect required. '' Hence flows the rule of the and of reserve in description of The elements which enter argument are collected from
only a moment of time is found in Lord Kaimes.* The underlying idea that poetry deals essentially with action is drawn no doubt from Aristotle's account of the drama as the central species of poetry, and is negatively suggested by " the Swiss." The corresponding idea that material or bodily beauty consists of pure unity in variety of form is a reminiscence of Hogarth and of classical aesthetic, and is negatively suggested by Winckelmann's treatment of allegory. But no one of Lessing's predecessors had united all these ideas in a single page of luminous deduction. The value to be ascribed to the abstract distinction thus laid down will be evident, I hope, as our history progresses. It is enough to say for the present that however it may be related to any complete philosophy of the beautiful, the distinction by succession and co-existence occupied a place of very great importance in our present subject matter "the data of modern aesthetic." now proceed to consider some consequences attached by Lessing to this principle. S. The term "beauty" is confined by Lessingr leBsing-s Atti" tude towards the ^ ..-il t' to material beauty, and is not treated as the essenProblem of wguness. (jal quality of poetry considered as art. Lord Kaimes, it may be noticed, confined the term beauty to objects of sight * and we have found the same tendency, far narrower than that of Plato or Aristotle, in mediaeval writers ^ from Plotinus downward. Thus when we find Lessing discussing the place of " beauty " in poetry he is only asking how far material beauty can effectively be depicted in language, to
We
tf
See Schasler, i. 351. Elements of Criticism,
See
'
p.
t-g-
i77'
205 above. Aquinas, see
* lb.
p.
146 above.
226
which he answers, in accordance with his principle, that it car only be either suggested by its effects, or represented as charm (Reiz *), which following Burke's account of grace, he I do not know that Lessing has defines as beauty in motion. framed a general conception of any essential quality shared by He habitually employs poetry with the fine arts as a class. " Poetry" and "Art" as antithetical terms, a usage common to-day, and always indicative of a failure or omission to co-
Even for his conception of the theory. to all species of poetry as such, I believe that we should find nothing more explicit than his account of the drama, which he with Aristotle regards as poetry in its highest concentration. He thus by omission rather than of set purpose partially anticipates the questionings of the age of genius as to whether the essential quality of modern art is really beauty, and not rather something else the interesting or the significant. And this omission to force poetry and formative art into the same theoretical scheme enables him to deal freely with the former in spite of his abstract conception of the latter. Thus he admits the ugly* into poetry as a means to the comic and the terrible, though the reason for which he does so that the effect of ugliness is weakened by presentation in language destroys in part the significance of his doing so. Formative art, on the other hand, he very decidedly limits to dealing with those visible objects which produce pleasant sensations. Although " as ' an imitative craft it can express ugliness, yet as a fine art it refuses to do so," even as a means to the comic and the terrible. The reason assigned for this refusal is the persistent force of ugly forms in pictorial presentation, which causes their disagreeable effect, like that of disgust (Ekel), to outlast the feeling of comedy or terror to
ordinate
them
in
poetical quality
common
which they
may have been a
means.
Thus he
rejects,
so far
as concerns the ugly, even Aristotle's plea for the pleasant effect of imitations of unpleasant reality, pointing out that the ugly in form produces its disagreeable effect quite apart from any reference to its real existence, and therefore in representation quite as much as in reality. This is the point correlative to that to which Burke drew attention when he said that a tragic reality, regarded apart from real interests, had the
1
Laocoon,
xxi.
Laocoon,
xxiii.
'
Laocoon,
xxiv.
EXPRESSION.
227
same
between
its representation. Thus by distinguishing which are the same in representation as in reality, and qualities which are not, Lessing really suggests the distinction between aesthetic and practical interest.
pleasures as
qualities
If we now pursue our point by asking how far this exclusion of ugliness betrays an abstract and unindividualised tendency in Lessing's conception of material beauty, we are met by the difificulty of knowing precisely what he included under ugliness. cannot quarrel with a critic for excluding the ugly from fine art, i.e. from the beautiful, unless we are sure that in doing so he is unaware how wide is the range of the concretely beautiful, and how narrow, even if we admit it to can only form a exist, is that of the insuperably ugly. judgment of Lessing's position in this respect by examining the degree in which he recognises any beauty other than that of mere form ultimately and strictly geometrical beauty as
We
We
analysed by Hogarth. In the first part of the Laocoon, before Winckelmann's History of Art had appeared, Lessing undoubtedly regards expression and truth as falling outside beauty. Not only does he regard beauty, thus abstracted, as the law of ancient formative art, but he stumbles into the terrible pitfall of treating As ancient statues are it as the exclusive aim of such art meaning and special feeling, which takes plainly charged with shape in tangible "attributes," i.e objects denoting an individual deity or relation of a deity, Lessing is driven to defend his view by distinguishing between the works in which religious or conventional tradition fettered the artist,' and those But in which he freely aimed at beauty for beauty's sake. demand for individual expressiveness in great and serious the art is not confined to identification of a personage by tangible and history shows that hazardous to art as the attributes didactic spirit is, the mood of great masters in great artperiods is nearer to the didactic spirit than to the conscious
;
All beauty, as we have seen, is ultimately expressiveness, and its substance and foundation falls away if the artist is not mastered by some burden or imProbably it was port for which he desires to find utterance. as correcting this distinction of Lessing, that Goethe laid down the îew that " The highest principle of the ancients
quest for abstract beauty.
'^
Laocoon,
ix.
228
significant,
was the
but the highest result of successful treat-
Beauty ôw^j, that is to say, when a ment, the beautiful." ^ duly handled, but is not a conscious significant content is shall have to return to this view and abstract purpose.
We
at a later stage. Expression, then,
and the significant, were prima facie exIt is worth cluded by Lessing from the materially beautiful. noting that he regarded the beauty of drapery as something very inferior the idea of his generation was that Greek statues were characteristically nude, and the expressive force of the treatment of drapery, as we now know it in the works " Beauty was the purof the great time, was unthought of. exclaims " necessity invented clothes and pose of art," he what has art to do with necessity ? " ^ "I greatly fear that the
;
most perfect master in drapery shows by this very skill where When Lessing makes a mistake, he his weakness lies." ^ makes it thoroughly.
In the notes for the second part of the Laocoon, written Winckelmann's History of Art had appeared, there is a change of phrase as compared with the first part but it is He now admits into beauty not a substantive modification. of expression, viz. the " permanent expression," an element which is " not violent," and which " is not only compatible * with beauty, but introduces more variety into beauty itself." This view obviously follows Winckelmann's conception of the high or grand style of beauty which is united with an expresWinckelmann, as we shall sion of repose and tranquillity, see, goes further afield in expression, but Lessing does not follow him. This is the extreme boundary of the variously expressive, significant, or characteristic, not to speak of the ugly, in LesHistorical painting, for instance, singfs idea of formative art. holds to be only justifiable as an excuse for a composition he of various beautiful forms to paint a scene for the sake of its import is, he thinks, to make the means into the end. Landscape painmg is the mere work of eye and hand (had Lessing been reading Reynolds' criticism on the Dutch
after
;
;
Hegel, Introd.
to yEsth.,
E. Tr., p. 36.
Laocooo, V. * We must remember that English portrait painters of that day used to employ an assistant to paint their draperies.
2 *
Laoc,
2,
iii.
UGLINESS IN FORMATIVE ART.

painters
229
? ^), genius has no share in it for the inorganic and vegetable world are incapable of an ideal. This seems to be a further borrowing from the History of Art. The ideal, according to it,* is that perfection which is suggested by a comparison of natural examples and we must suppose that in the inorganic world and the world of plants he sees no such law of types and tendencies as to make it possible for a more perfect form to be suggested for them by the exercise of the intelligence on their given structure. "The highest bodily beauty exists only in man, and in him only because of the ideal," * i.e. I presume, because of his marked unity and coherence as a organism, which enables a partial defect to be corrected by a suggestion drawn from another example, whereas, of two mountain shapes, who can say which is the " There is no ideal of that in which Nature has right one ? proposed to herself nothing definite." * may conclude this part of the examination of Lessing's views with his amazing question, " Would it not have been better if oil painting had never been invented ? " * After this we need ask no further questions about Lessing's general attitude towards ugliness in formative art. His notion of material beauty was fundamentally that of formal, geometrical, or decorative beauty, and even his selection of the human form as the type of the beautiful is scarcely to be justified out of his aesthetic theory for what is the human form if it expresses no human qualities ? ^^ e. In one point, however, modern feeling has niBâaidsmwaB sympathised with Lessing's classicism, although Justified. jj ^jjj never cease to feel a certain attraction .in the quaint horrors of mediaeval art. The Greeks, Lessing had maintained in the Laocoon,* and even their poets, had never portrayed death under the image of a skeleton, in the manner of mediaeval and contemporary artists, but rather, in agreement with Homer, as the twin brother of sleep. This
; ;
We
assertion
drew upon him an attack

treatise,
1769 with the short

^
How
to which he replied in the Ancients Represented

Style."
*
*
No. 79. See Ruskin, Modern Painters, " On the Grand Winckelmann, GescA. d. bildenden Kunst d. Alien, iv. 2. 35. Laoc, 2. ii. Laoc, 2. iv.
Idler,
Lessing's Leben, Laoc, xi. note.
ii.
57.
230
Death.
figure,
In this he identified the common monumental resembling an Amor but leaning on a reversed torch, as the normal image of death among the Greeks, and found another explanation of the antique skeleton figures, whose The existence had been alleged as an argument against him. sane though sympathetic manner in which he treats the whole subject one of those in which romantic sentiment compares was least favourably with the cheerful calm of the ancients popular rapprochement between perhaps the first simple and genuine Greek feeling and the profound convictions of modern life and in this respect anticipated the dawn of a new era in which Greek art and intelligence were felt to possess a real message for humanity. It was this work, no doubt, that stirred Schiller to sing in the "Gotter Griechenlands :"
" Damals ^
trat
kein grassliches Gerippe
Vor das Bett des Sterbenden. Ein Kuss Nahm das letzte Leben von der Lippe,
Seine Fackel senkt' ein Genius."
Lessins's Theory
have sufficiently seen that from the time Corneille to that of Gottsched theories of poetry appealing to the authority of Aristotle were common Lessing stands within this both in France and Germany. tradition which is modified in his case by peculiar circumXy-
^^
of the Drama,
of
stances.
begin with, the pseudo-classical tradition itself had at time reached a critical point. By invading Germany, it had suggested, even in Gottsched's hands, the idea of a national drama. And while making this suggestion, it had revealed that its own work was done. Voltaire,^ its most decided partisan, spoke with curious candour of the languor and rigidity of the French drama. The form generated by
this
To
classicism had become fixed, and German genius, when awakened by
had no
its
fecundity.
The
be content with it. Still less essentially an appeal to Caesar, the classical tradition was at length brought before his judgment-seat when the "ancients" whose supposed authority had warranted such strange things were produced in broad daylight as the touchstone of poetry,
;
means, could not long was this possible when, being
A kiss received the last life from

*
" In those days no gruesome skeleton approached the bed of the dying. the lips, and a Genius reversed his torch." Quoted in Hamburgische Dramaturgie, ii. 194.
GERMANY AND ENGLAND.

by a genuine scholar with
Lessing
the and loved
is first
23
sy^npathy.
real
poetical
For
popular writer among the moderns who knew Homer and Sophocles as a cultivated man of letters knows and loves them to-day. Tîe germs of the comparison in question lay in the whole history and tendency of the Renaissance and the subsequent age. It was impossible that the world should go on for ever talking about the ancients without caring to know what the greatest of them was like ; and Lessing happened to be the first man who had the critical genius necessary to make this plain. The first Renaissance was Latin the second was Greek and Lessing in one craft, like Winckelmann in another, opened the way from the first to the second. But, in the next place, the French classical tradition was confronted in Germany not only by the true spirit of antiquity which it had aroused, because it was "classical," but by the spirit of intellectual kinship between England and Germany, which it aroused because it was French. The Germans were beginning to feel their affinity with the English mind and speech, and working backwards from the nearer to the more remote, according to the principle which we have so often observed, they first laid hold on writers contemporary or nearly so* thus Gottsched on the Spectator and Addison's Cato, the Swiss on Thomson, Young and Milton, and then, in Lessing's generation, they traced the same affinity back to Shakespeare. It would be a crude account of Lessing's theory, but not wholly a false one, to say that his heart was set on proving Shakespeare, and not Racine, to be correct His synthesis of the according to Sophocles and Aristotle. true classical and the romantic drama owed much to the collision of the French and German mind, which expressed itself in his almost personal hostility to Gottsched and
; ;
we have to observe that Lessing lived at a time * when the dramatic forms were being modified, and the novel of family life was beginning to exert an entirely new influence. As regards this modification of dramatic species, " I desire to it is simplest to quote Lessing's own words.^
* *
Voltaire. And thirdly
Lessing's Leben, i. 279. Lessing's Zeien, i. 294, ff. * Lessing's Leben, i. 294.
232
speak of the changes which in our time have been made in dramatic poetry. Neither comedy nor tragedy has been spared. The former has been raised several degrees, and the In the former case it latter lowered in the same measure. was thought that the world had had enough of laughing at the comic play and hissing ridiculous vices and so the fancy suggested itself, to let the world at last have its turn at weeping even in comedy, and find a noble entertainment in tranquil virtues. In tragedy again it was held unreasonable that no one but sovereigns and persons of rank should be capable of awaking our pity and terror so middle-class heroes were sought out, and the tragic buskin buckled on them, whereas before The forthe only object had been to make them laughable. mer change created what its partisans call the pathetic, and From the second there its antagonists the crying comedy. arose bourgeois (middle class) tragedy." " The former change
;
;
was made by the French,^ the
I should latter by the English. almost venture to say that both of them arose from the pecuThe Frenchman is a creature liar disposition of these peoples. that always desires to appear greater than he is. The Englishman is one who likes to pull down everything great to his own level. The former disliked to see himself always represented on the comic side a secret ambition drove him to show persons like himself in a noble light. The latter found it vexatious to give so much precedence to crowned heads he thought he could feel that violent passions and sublime thoughts belonged no more to them than to one of his own
; ;
rank." Lessing's early tragedy. Miss Sara Sampson, which was warmly >yelcomed in the ournal Stranger for 1761, probably by Diderot,* was the first German "middle-class tragedy," and reveals the influence under which it was composed by the fact ' that its motives are drawn from The Merchant of London the first English middle-class tragedy, and from Clarissa Harlowe, the first novel of family life, which introduced the poetry of the family to modern Europe. In one way or another, though in the case of comedy not in identical descent from the "Comddie larmoyante," the serious non-tragic
e.g.
ment see
'
Nivelle de la Chaussê, about 1740. Lessing's Leben, i. 291. Lessing's Leben, i. 467.
i.
For an account of the move-
Cf.
30s.
THEORY OF TRAGEDY.
233
drama and the middle-class tragedy were continued by Lessing himself and by Diderot. Lessing calls his Emilia Galotti a
" middle-class Virginia," * " middle-class," not in contrast to Livy's story, but in contrast to the habitual treatment of the same subject on the French stage. And these two forms insensibly shade off into the novel-like mixed drama of real life with which we are familiar to-day. Whether any good can come of this movement in the future from the standpoint of serious dramatic art, appears problematic but this appearance arises from the general difficulties attaching to dramatic art as such, and not from the abandonment of a forced distinction between tragedy and comedy. For the approximation
;
between the two, not formally recognised before the time of which we are writing, was really a matter of older date. Goethe called Moliere's Misanthrope a tragedy,'' and this play is taken as the earliest modern example of serious comedy by the first theoretical writer on the subject, about And we all know what Shakespearian comedy is at its 1 740. most serious points we can hardly say whether Measure for Measure, and Much Ado about Nothing, are serious comedies or tragedies with happy endings. Thus it was quite clear that if the theory of tragedy was to have a real bearing for romantic poetry it must in some degree be widened, and shown not to depend on the absolute distinction of the two sides of life which appeared to be presupposed both in practice of the ancients, and in Aristotle's history of the drama and theory of tragedy. The problem through which more particularly the above
;
influences
the serious study of
antiquity, the national or racial
spirit opposed to a foreign tradition, and the modification of the distinction between dramatic species acted on Lessing's formal aesthetic criticism is that of the interpretation to be placed on Aristotle's account of the tragic emotions, and the estimate, consequent on this interpretation, of his ideas concerning the
character of the true tragic hero.
1 He took the plot from the story of Virginia, omitting the political background, intending thereby to isolate and purify the tragic motive. I imagine most readers will feel that the story is thus altogether spoilt, that outlook into a larger life which we get even in Romeo and Juliet, through the healing of the feud, being here entirely closed. Lessing's Lebm, ii. 309 ff. * Lessing's Leben, i. 294-5-
234
to the fundamental condition of the drama, its unity, demands of the pseudo-classical school fall into their places at once when Lessing points out that the only unity which is either fundamental in itself or essentially
For as
the
artificial
the unity of action, and that the others, so far as necessary, are mere corollaries from this, made more important in the ancient world by the presence of the Chorus,^ This latter remark, it will be remembered, had already been made by Lord Kaimes. This view of the unities is in itself the simplest case of the reconciliation between ancient theory and modern romantic practice. Aristotle's account of the tragic emotions, of their effect on the mind, and of the character therefore required for a hero of tragedy, have been briefly explained in dealing with Aristotle's views at first hand. But this appears to be the right place to point out their relation to the development of aesthetic criticism in modern
demanded by
Aristotle,
is
times.
The paradox of Lessing's position is this he contends that Aristotle's analysis of tragedy essentially justifies the romantic drama. But his first duty as an interpreter of Aristotle is to convict Corneille and similar writers of having understood him not too narrowly, but too loosely. It is not, therefore, through what what we might call the surface extension assigned to Aristotle's ideas, but by tracing them down to their root in human nature, that first Lessing, and then Bernays who is to Lessing as the latter to Corneille was able to maintain their essential value for poetry as we under:
stand
it.
us, then, the question of Aristotle's meaning in selecting pity and fear as the special emotions of tragedy, is one of the same class which was described in general terms when we spoke of his views. Throwing aside all minutiae, we may state it thus on its merits. Tragedy, we find in his definition, affects the mind in a certain way, " by means of pity and fear." Are these terms employed currente calamo, to indicate the first samples that come to hand, and, of course, as the first, the chief and most striking samples, of the various emotions which are aroused by the spectacle of any serious and complete piece of human history or is there a precise systematic
;
For
Lessing's Leben,
ii.
i68.
PITY
AND FEAR.
235
intention in the exclusiveness with which these two and no others are adduced, and an essential connection between the one and the other ? far are we dealing with a naive though acute observation, and how far with a systematic analysis conjoined with a general theory of serious poetry ?
How
Comeille, to judge from his comments, must have adopted the former view, and thus he easily widens the definition by laxity and on the surface. For we saw^ that his aim in his theoretical writing was the same as that of Lessing in the Dramahirgie, to reconcile modern beauties with ancient rules. Pity and fear, he says in effect, are not to be taken as essentially connected they are feelings either of which by itself may form the interest of a tragedy, and there may be others besides which Aristotle did not happen to notice, such cis admiration, so that his account of the tragic emotions is casual and partial, and his exclusion of perfect and monstrous characters depended merely on his not having noticed that pity could be successfully aroused by the one, and fear by the other. His definition, in short, is taken as empirically descriptive and so with a little good-will it can be extended to include even the saints and monsters of Corneille's plays. Now Lessing, to whom Bernays, intent upon the "purification " controversy,, does less than justice as regards the whole matter, brings to bear on the subject, and, as he claims, almost for the first time, the reciprocal definitions of pity and His earlier view,'' however, rejects fear from the Rhetoric. the exclusive interdependence of pity and fear as erroneous, and is thus markedly more in harmony with Corneille than But he then makes, I feel bound to that of the Dramaturgic. contend, the great step on which the later and more subtle theory both of Lessing himself and also of Bernays, is For he substitutes Burke's " sympathy," the Gerfounded. " Mitleid," on which Lessing even plays by calling it man "Mitleiden" (which merely means sharing the feeling or suffering of another, and does not necessarily indicate a specific emotion attached to so doing), for the perfecdy definite Greek term e'Xeo?, " compassion" or " pity." Thus there is dragged in the whole modern or romantic conception, so powerfully developed by Bernays, of the widening of the individual self into the great self of humanity.
;
Page
197, above.
Lessing's
Leben,
i.
363, a letter toNicolai before 1758.
236
In the Dramaturgie,^ written some ten years later, ^ when Lessing, as critic to the Hamburg theatre, was doing his best to aid the creation of a " national drama " for Germany, he accepts the exclusive and essential connection of pity and fear as instruments of tragic effect, and does not attempt to extend the import of these expressions so as to include analogous emotion, except in as far as they describe the object-matter of the tragic purification as opposed to its instruments. Therefore his view comes to be essentially that of Bernays, that Aristotle intends to insist on the essential interconnection of sympathy and fear, in the sense that our feeling of a common nature and possibilities shared by ourself and the person in the drama awakens in us the thought of our own participation in that human destiny which can do such things as we see. It is plain that in this exposition width of application is not obtained by a laxity like that of Corneille, but by confining the definition more strictly to the emotions which Aristotle named, and then interpreting these emotions with a larger and deeper reference to human nature. And so in Bernays himself, who in his turn condemns
Lessing for laxity, we find the tragic emotions traced so deep into the roots of human nature that no serious art whatever need fall outside their province. I quote a characteristic
sentence:' "It is only when the actual [material, external] fear operates indirecdy through sympathy with a person, that the process of purgation can take place in the spectator's mind, by the individual self being enlarged into the self of all humanity, and so coming face to face with the terribly sublime laws of the universe and their incomprehensible power, which envelops mankind, and being penetrated by that sort of fear which as an ecstatic shudder in presence of the universe [" dem All "] is pleasurable in the highest way and without disturbance." It is clear that while professing to remain within the Aristotelian theory of tragedy, we have here arrived at a generalised conception of tragic motive which is applicable to any serious portrayal of life however romantic, however formless, however free from external collision or catastrophe. Not only Shakespeare's tragedy and serious comedy, but the Cenci and Vanity Fair (although it is called
1 II. Sect. 65. * 8 1767-8. Bernays, Zwei Abhandlungen,
etc., Berlin,
1880, p. 74.
MEANING OF
" PITY.
237
" a novel without a hero ") and La Cousine Bette are easily and naturally included within such a doctrine. It may indeed be admitted to be a development inherent in Aristotle's theory, to which the strict interdependence of pity and fear, known from the Rhetoric, undoubtedly gives a systematic value not evident from the words preserved in the Poetic. Yet if we
are asked
how
far
it
represents Aristotle's meaning,
think
we can
but answer, as
we have answered
in
analogous cases, ^
that his actual meaning lies somewhere between these two extremes of naive observation and idealistic world-theory. Of the two, I confess that I believe it to have approximated more nearly to the former. It is a far cry from eXeo? to " Mitleid," and from " Mitleid " to " Mit-leiden " and so it is from (poôs to the overwhelming sense of law in the universe. The characters demanded by Aristotle for the persons of a tragedy strengthen this opinion. To an unbiassed reader his treatment of this point must seem thoroughly naive. It is not that he demands for the hero mere human nature, so that our own human nature may feel itself implicated in his misfortunes his idea of the qualities which have power to evoke our sympathy and our fear is narrowly confined to unmerited The concepsuffering and to an average moral disposition, tion of greatness, whether in evil or in good, does not present Lessing has not, I think, treated Shakeitself to his mind. peare's Richard III. in connection with his Aristotelian and I cannot imagine that in this instance he theorem But if Aristotle had could have made good his usual thesis. freely as Bernays or even Lessing construed his own theory as construes it for him, the deeper manifestations of individual character and its collisions with necessity would have been more prominent in his analysis of a tragic plot. On the question of "purification" or rather "purgation," which has been treated in the chapter on Aristotle, there
; ; ;
seems to be no doubt whatever that Bernays is strictly in the right, and that he is thoroughly justified in his ridicule of the notion that tragedy was to transform the passions into " virtuous capacities," * and of the consequent application to them Here we see of the misapprehended doctrine of the mean. Lessing stands between the earlier and the later modems. how
1
See above, p. 73. " Tugendhafte Fertigkeiten," Dramaturgic,
Lc
238
and we feel that his presupposition of the moral aim of poetry,^ though most perfectly guarded against the suggestion of an
abstract didactic purpose, is painful to our consciousness to-day. The idea which lies at the root of the Laocoon and of the Dramaturgie, that poetry deals only with action, seemed to Herder to involve a massacre among poets which none but Homer and the dramatists could survive. For lyrical poetry Lessing had certainly little feeling ; yet " action," taken in the widest sense, according to the definition which forms the core of the Laocoon, might include the movement of emotion in a
human
heart.
But however this might be, it was worth while to run the hazard of a temporary onesidedness of appreciation, for the sake of wholly freeing poetic art from such narrow laws as those which Lessing understood to be the laws of material beauty, and assigning to it the wide subject-matter of human life in all its variations from the comic to the terrible. This
conception, culminating in the importance assigned to the drama, and supported by a profound enthusiasm for Shakespeare and for the Greeks, stamped itself unmistakably upon the poetry * and also upon the philosophy of the next generation in
'
Germany.
Dramaturgie, ii. 77. As in the conception of death, so in the estimate of dramatic value, Schiller's poetry follows Lessing's criticism. The lines addressed by Schiller to Goethe on the occasion of Voltaire's Mahomet being put on the stage at Weimar are of great significance in this respect. I quote two stanzas
*
Einheim'scher Kunst
ist
dieser Schauplatz eigen,
Hier wird nicht fremden Gotzen mehr gedient ; Wir konnen muthig einen Lorbeer zeigen, Der auf dem deutschen Pindus selbst gegriint. Selbst in der Kiinste Heiligthum zu steigen. Hat sich der deutsche Genius erkiihnt, Und auf der Spur des Griechen und des Britten
Ist er
dem bessem Ruhme
nachgeschritten,
Nicht Muster zwar darf uns der Franke werden ! Aus seiner Kunst spricht kein lebend'ger Geist Des falschen Anstands prunkende Geberden Verschmaht der Sinn, der nur das Wahre preist I Ein Fiihrer nur zum Bessem soil er werden, Er komme, wie ein abgeschiedner Geist, Zu reinigen die oft entweihte Scene Zum wiird'gen Sitz der alten Melpomene.
WORK OF WINCKELMANN.
239
and of
if its actual outcome in the drama of Lessing himself Schiller and his contemporaries is of smaller permanent value for the stage than appeared probable at first, and if we even find a certain unreality in the supremacy which aesthetic, alter Lessing's example, still assigns to dramatic form in an
And
its vitality seems doubtful, yet in the preparation of data for modern aesthetic science there has been no much more potent influence than this co-ordination of the more comparable poetic forms of the antique and the modern world. For it involves ipso facto a combination of the more reserved and more exuberant, the more abstract and more individual kinds of utterance as alike expressions of human life and passion. What Lessing was thus doing for poetry it was the task of Winckelmann to do for formative art, in which Lessing had not even taken the trouble to distinguish painting from
age when
sculpture.*
wi.i-..V'-
Winckelmann (171 7-1768)

to
name
his
liar
is now a mere most English students and to many of
This is the inevitable result of the pecunature of his services to aesthetic. Just because his work was fertile in its principles, it has grown in the hands of his successors, and there is nothing which we can now learn from him about the Greek spirit and history, and extant sculptures, so well as from Hegel and Goethe, Grote and
own countrymen.
His style, though clear and cannot compensate the modern reader for the tedium of lengthy discussions upon particular statues and parts of statues, in which the great works that inould our judgment are not taken account of. Yet Mr. Pater's delightful essay * may, it is to be hoped, sustain among English writers a cerCurtius,
striking,
Overbeck and Murray.
permanent interest in the man whose ideas struck root in the minds of Schiller and Goethe, Hegel and Schelling, and have in an incalculable degree contributed to the human and sympathetic spirit which marks the historical and archaeological researches of to-day. The characteristics by which he produced the effect which
tain
^ The influence of casual circumstances is such that I hardly think it too audacious to suggest that Lessing's carelessness in taking his first title from a group in marble for a work whose second title mentions painting as its subject, was connected with the fact, that he had to judge of sculpture chiefly or solely from drawings and engravings. ^ In The Renaissance, by Walter Pater Macmillan & Co.
:
240
I
HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC,
have thus ascribed to him may be summed up under four
heads.
a. The sense of real contact with the human mind in the study of workmanship. /3. The extension of this sense into an appreciation of organic development in art correlative to that in social and
political conditions.
y. The consequent recognition of various phases of expressiveness within the beauty of plastic art. S. The open admission of conflicting claims on behalf of formal beauty and of expression, and their partial reconcili-
ation.
Strange comparison to set the beside that of Bacon. But ^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ Constant diatribes of the former against mere "book-learning,"^ or against the work of "Scribes,"^ in comparison with the knowledge of the educated eye, without feeling their motive to be fundamentally the same as that of Bacon, the eagerness for contact with reality at first hand.' Thus " research and insight into art we look for in vain in the great costly works descriptive of ancient statues, which have as yet been published. The description of a statue ought to demonstrate the cause of its beauty, and point out the individuality in the style of its art; but where is it taught in what the beauty of a statue consists, and what scribe has looked at it with an artist's eye ?" He contends that it is hopeless to judge adequately of statues froni drawings and engravings, and concludes that it is not feasible to write anything of value upon ancient art except at Rome, then the great storehouse of antiquities. Rome was to him what external nature was to Bacon. You cannot qualify as a judge of art by spending a mere month at Rome, he is
Feeling for Art as Hiunan Production.
"'
I*
"^^7 ^^^"^
3.
name of Winckelmann
always repeating, in allusion to some countrymen of his who had made no longer stay. Or again " How has it happened,* whereas profound treatises have appeared in all other sciences, that the rationale of art and of beauty has been so little enquired into ? Reader the fault
:
!
* *
" Scribenten."
" Belesenheit "a curiously expressive term of disparagemenU
GescA. d. Bildendm * Geschichte, iv. 2, 5.
Kunst, Introd.
ii
BACON AND WINCKELMANN.

lies in
24
our innate indolence as regards thinking for ourselves, wisdom of the schools. For on the one hand the ancient works of art have been regarded as beauties to the enjoyment of which we cannot hope to attain, and which therefore readily warm the imagination of a few, but do not penetrate the soul, and antiquities have only given occasion for shooting the rubbish of book-learning, but have afforded no nourishment or hardly any to the reason. On the other hand again, since philosophy * has chiefly been practised and taught by such as, through reading their dryasdust prede-
and
in the
cessors therein, are forced to leave
little
room
for feeling,
and
cover it up, so to speak, with a hard skin, we have been led through a labyrinth of metaphysical subtleties and circumlocutions which after all have chiefly served to excogitate huge books and sicken the understanding." The appeal to reason, feeling and understanding within the same page is characteristic of Winckelmann, whose apparent laxity of terminology, often amounting to absolute self-contradiction, indicates not merely a neglect of theoretical refinement, but also a genuine concreteness of thought. Plainly we have in such passages as the above, which might be endlessly multiplied, the same craving of which Bacon is so eloquent an exponent, the craving for an escape from the world of books and reflection into that of direct sensuous observation, involving probably a consciousness that human faculties demand other nutrition and exercise than that which a mere literary medium can supply: " Hardly any scribe can penetrate the inmost essence of art."^ The difference between the two revivals is that the observation of which Winckelmann speaks is directed not to natural nature, except in human beings, to whose beauty he is exceedingly sensitive, but to artificial nature, which though material Inevitably thereis yet the work and utterance of the mind. fore this later return to nature besides educating the perception of the beautiful, formed a bridge from physical and mathematical science to the anthropological and philosophical sciences. How deeply Winckelmann realised this aspect of his researches as grasping a new province of life, in the direct significance of which, however trivial its data may appear, mind answers to mind across the ages, may be indicated by
1
Weltweisheit.
Geschichte, Introd.
ii.
242
" Even in this study (of Greek coins) shall not lose ourselves in trivialities, if antiquities are
one more quotation.^
we
regarded as the works of men whose minds were higher and more masculine than ours and this recognition has power, in conducting such a research, to exalt us above ourselves and thinking soul cannot busy itself with low above our age. ideas on the shore of the broad sea the immeasurable prospect widens the limits of the mind, which at first appears to lose itself, but then returns to us greater than before." I do not know that the self-assertive reaction of the mind which constitutes the feeling of the Sublime had been thus
;
concisely described before these words were written"* ( 1 766), although many suggestions of the idea are to be found in Burke. However this may be, it is certain that the fullest theory of art is approached in proportion as we recognise that the work is the expression of the workman's life. ^- Consequent upon this recognition is the True sense of a History of Art. conception of art as something that has a history and phases of its own a growth and a decline corresponding to and rooted in the history and conditions of peoples. This organic standpoint in relation to art Goethe emphatically ascribes to Winckelmann,* and although the ideas of concrete history were in the air, and should not be hastily credited to any one man, yet undoubtedly we find in him more than one of the suggestions which have helped to make the greatness of later students of antiquity. Let us take for example his conception of history* as a ia-ropla, a research and a " The history of Art aims at system, not a chronicle.
expounding its origin, growth, change, and fall, together with the diverse styles of peoples, ages, and artists, and at demonstrating this, as far as possible, from the extant works of antiquity." This attempt to trace a development extending through long ages in its essential causes and connection was, he affirmed, a new thing in the literature of art. I am very much inclined to think, that, but for the great conception of Scaliger,* it was a new thing in the science of history.
^
5*
Gesch., Introd. xxiii.
Wmckelmann
u.
seinjahrh.
i.
'
Gesch., Einleitung
ii.
See p. 189 above. For suggestions of Winckelmann u. sein Jahrhundert.

*
it
in ancient writers see Goethe.
ART AND
ITS CONDITIONS.
243
Among special points of historical significance which he treats in conformity with this idea I may mention four. First, he observes that works of art are in their first beginnings
all
formless and
all
alike,
just
as are the seeds of
different plants.^
Secondly, this acute observation enabled him to understand,
Greek an independent development, not borrowed from

in spite of appearances to the contrary, that
art
was
oriental
nations. This view maintains itself on the whole, through many vicissitudes, at the present day. It is admitted that in early times many technical processes, many modes of decorative ornamentation, and even certain detached phases of style such as that shown in the lions of Mycenae, were introduced by aliens or imitated from their work. But as regards the archaic sculptures which belong to the Greek development proper, it appears to be agreed that their "Egyptian" appearance indicates no foreign connection, but is simply a result of a superficial similarity of treatment in the early art of different countries. The two further points may be introduced in Winckelmann's own words. " The cause ^ and reason of the eminence
art attained among the Greeks is in part to be ascribed to the influence of the climate, in part to their polity and
which
government, and the mode of thought formed by it." Thirdly, then, in speaking of the climate ' he follows up the idea which is referred to both by Plato and Aristotle, probably borrowing from Herodotus,* that Greece occupies a medium position between Europe and Asia in climate as in other respects, and that therefore the nature of the Greeks is and their bodily formation, Winckelmann the finest possible subjoins, corresponded to their fortunate natural conditions. He is also well aware of the historical importance of the subdivision of Greek territory by physical obstacles, and ascribes to this cause the later development of art in Greece as con;
with Egypt.* Those who are familiar with the treatment of the climate, position, and physical conformation
trasted
of Greece by modern
1
writers, as for
example by
Curtius, will
Gesch.
i.
I. I.
2 Jb. iv. I. 4.
lb. iv. I. 6.
* Hdt. 3. 106.
6
Plato, Republ.
435 E.
Ar., Pol. 7. 7.
lb.
i.
I. 7-
244
feel
the importance of these observations in a writer of the eighteenth century. And, fourthly, if in speaking of the Greek political system he seems blind to its ignoble side, we must yet give him credit for the penetration and enthusiasm which enabled him, more than a century ego, to appreciate the splendid attributes of Hellenic freedom and we must remember that owing in great measure to him this larger sympathy for Greek life has been current in Germany ever since his day, while in England we owe it, as a general influence, to a comparatively recent interest awakened by our own political development. " In respect of the constitution and government of Greece," he says,^ " freedom is the principal cause of the pre-eminence of their art. ... It was freedom,^ the mother of great events, of political changes, and of rivalry among the Greeks, that implanted as if at birth the germs of noble and lofty dispositions and just as the prospect of the immeasurable surface of the sea, and the beating of the proud waves on the cliffs of the shore, enlarges our gaze, and raises the mind above mean issues, so, in presence of such great things and persons,, it was impossible to think ignobly." y- ^ ^"^ convinced that Winckelmann's theory Recognition of ^3esin of beauty can only be understood in relation to his history of art. He always uses abstract terms in a relative sense, with reference to the character which he desires to emphasise in one period as contrasted with another ; and thus there arise constant verbal contradictions, which do not cause the smallest perplexity to any one who reads the history continuously, but which resist every attempt to interpret the terms as indicating a system of mutually exclusive qualities.
; ;
He
divides
Scaliger's periods of
Greek art into four Greek poetry.
periods,*
suggested by
In the earliest or " older " style, taken to begin after the formless first attempts of art, and lasting to the generation before Pheidias, the drawing was emphatic but hard, powerful but without grace and the strong expression diminished the beauty.* This latter clause we might demur to so far as concerns the face, in which expression had hardly been atIt might have more truth of the figure. tained. Winckelmann remarks the strange minuteness of detail with which the
;
Geich.,
iv. i.
13.
lb., iv. i. 19.
s lb., viii. i. 4.
* lb.,
viii.
1. 17.
THE GRAND
STYLE.
245
robes are sometimes elaborated in the art of this " older

period.
The second, the "lofty" or " grand " style ^ arose "when the time of complete enlightenment and freedom in Greece appeared." This style, of which Winckelmann divined rather than knew the characteristics, he treated as beginning with Pheidias and including the work of Scopas, to whom he attributed the Niobe group. This group, and a statue of Athene then in the Villa Albani, and probably identical with one still preserved there,* were the only works in Rome, which means the only works known to Winckelmann in the marble, that he assigned to the period of this style. It is surprising to us that he should separate Scopas from Praxiteles, by including the former in this period and the latter in the next ; but of course there is a strong tendency when examples are scarce, to extend the limits of a division so that it may not be empty. In this high or grand style, called "grand" because the artists made grandeur and not merely beauty their principal aim,' Winckelmann expected to find a certain hardness and angularity, though remarking that good drawing often seems hard to common critics both ancient and modern.* He constantly compares the art of this period with that of Raphael. Its characteristic is a lofty simplicity and unity, like that of an idea arising without help of the senses and without the labour of These expressions do not contain any theory construction.* of abstract idealism independent of sense-perception they are simply intended to reproduce the author's strong feeling of the He illustrates them by unity and spontaneity of great art. Raphael's alleged power of drawing the outline of a head for his most sacred subjects with a single stroke of the pen, that
;
needed no subsequent correction. It is however idle to deny that Winckelmann, being, as we may say, never on his guard, did sometimes lean to the fatal
"Hohe,"
Professor
me that he is of opinion that the statue referred to must be No. 1012 now in the Villa Albani, and recognisable by having a lion-skin instead of a helmet on the head. " Sie ist in der That," he adds, " ein Muster des hohen Stils." I regret that I have never seen this
3
or "grosse Stil," Gesch., viii. Brunn has kindly informed
2. i.
statue.
*
Gesch.,
viii. 2. i.
* lb.,
viii. 2. 3.
2. 4, " Die gleichsam unerschaffene Begriff Unbezeichnung," a quality of beauty, iv. 2. 23.
5 lb., viii.
d. Schonheit," cf.
"
d.
246
inference that true beauty, such as that of the high style, being one in conception, must also be capable of but one expression. This is established to demonstration by the fact that he assigns their participation in the highest beauty as a reason for the likeness between Niobe and her daughters} The next or "beautiful" style, also treated as the style of grace, began with Praxiteles and lasted till the first successors of Alexander. It is to the preceding style as the painting of shall see directly that the Guido to that of Raphael. grace thus spoken of is only a relative and not an absolute distinction between this and other periods of art. Last came the manner of the imitators, due to the fact that the idea of beauty if he meant the ancient idea of beauty, the reason was a good one was exhausted and could be pushed no farther. " Therefore, art, in which as in all the operations of nature, there can be no condition of immobility, was forced to go back as it did not go forward." It is noteworthy to find the author whose principle for modern art is supposed to be " the imitation of the Greeks," laying down as an axiom that he who follows must always be behind.* Art, like philosophy, became eclectic, and fastened upon trifles which had been thought detrimental to style in its prime. Winckelmann's want of sympathy for modern painting has been greatly exaggerated. It is wild to say with Schasler that he recognised no art but that of the ancient Greeks.* On the contrary, he recognised the principles of history as of general application, and drew the parallel, which though obvious is none the less profound, between the four periods of Greek and four of Italian art. It is true that he does not show appreciation of the Dutch school, but how hard that was, and to many minds still is Whereas the severity of his judgment upon later Italian painting and sculpture is only an approximation to the views accepted to-day, and his superiority in this respect to his age is shown by the dismay of his editors, Meyer and Schulze, at his round assertion that bad taste set in after Raphael and Michael Angelo, and that sculpture came to an end with Michael Angelo and Sanso-
We
vino.*
He
even observes that Leonardo and Andrea del

10.
^ /5., viii. 2. 2 It
"Der Nachahmer ist allezeit unter dera Nachgeahmten

i.
geblieben,"viii. 3. i.
Schasler,
209.
G.
d. a.
K.,
iii.
3. 18,
with editor's note, 1023.
CONTRADICTIONS IN WINCKELMANN.
247
Sarto, who had had little opportunity for seeing the works of the ancients, thought and worked as we must suppose the
Greek painters to have done.^ Whatever isolated expressions we may
find in
Winckel-
mann about
simple and noble beauty, which seem to confine the beautiful to the abstract and the formal, it is plain that a writer for whom the beautiful comprehended so many phases and types of expressiveness, some of them though different yet treated as co-ordinate, cannot conceivably be reckoned as narrowing the range of beauty to a single abstract type. Before proceeding to discuss his antithesis of beauty and expression, I will give other instances of the contradictions which are partly reconciled by the re-adaptation of conceptions in his mind, as he discovers their relativity. The "high" or "grand" style is, as we have seen, not the same as the " beautiful " style par excellence, but is distinguished from it much as the "sublime," a term frequently applied to the beauty of the grand style, is usually distinguished from the " beautiful." Yet the high style is expressly said to be the style which aims at " true" beauty. ^ Thus the grand or sublime is co-ordinated with the beautiful. Again it is the principle of the grand style to express no sensibility * but yet there is not in human nature any state free from sensibility or passion,* and beauty without expression would be without significance.^ \n fact then, the grand style is " the expression of a significant and eloquent silence of the soul," and is, as Plato said, the most difficult form of expression anything violent is far more easily represented.* possible Thus the absence of expression and the highest form of expression are really identified, and how natural this meeting of extremes is to Winckelmann may be shown by contrasting with the reference to Plato just mentioned, a passage in which he suggests that, as free from passion, " the idea of the highest beauty may seem to be the simplest and easiest thing, demanding no inquiry into the passions and their expres;
;
sion.
The conception of grace is first introduced as distinctive of the " beautiful " style,* but after a short discussion it breaks up into species, of which that originally mentioned, the char1 6
G.
d. a.
K.
V. 3.
28.
2
*
viii. 2.
10. II.
viii. 2.
11.
* iv. 2. 24.
^ viii. 2. 9.
V. 3. 4.
viii. 2.
^ iv. 2. 23.
248
zone of comparison developed
acteristic of the " beautiful " style, is to the first as the
Aphrodite to the beauty of Hera
by
section ^ that shortly Wiirde. indicates this expansion of the idea of grace is worth quoting at length "Of the second or more amiable grace [the distinction taken is that it is less self-contained, and appeals more consciously to the spectator, than the first] one may form a conthe head of Leucothea in the Capitoline ception from Museum, and for a further insight into that wherein the ancient artists held grace to consist, one should compare with these and similar heads the pictures of Correggio, the painter of And then one will be convinced that from this modern grace. grace, not seldom affected and frequently exaggerated, to the amiable grace of the ancient artists of the beautiful style, is no smaller leap than true judges of art will have seen that it is from the latter to the sublime grace of the "high" style." Here we note again how simple contrast is replaced by The author even applies to three types of co-ordination. grace the terms tragic, epic, and comic grace.' The third of these hardly coincides with the grace of Correggio, but rather applies to children. Fauns, Bacchantes, and such subjects, in which beauty is not completely attained. Thus we see how
Schiller in
:
Anmuth and
wide Winckelmann
^.
is
,
prepared to throw his

1
net.
are partly prepared for Winckelman's - .-. ^ . ^ *^ 1 Conflict between , , Beauty and idea oi the relation between beauty and expression, ExpreBsion. y^^^ j^y ^^ general form of the co-ordinations just mentioned, and by the apparent contradiction of his views on the place of expressiveness in the highest beauty. Here, just as in the other cases, he starts with a direct antithesis. Expression is detrimental to beauty.* The two are opposing qualities. Beauty is in the first instance the beauty of pure form, which appears to mean the beauty of shape as exhibiting unity in variety, emphasis being laid on the variety, as in " The forms of a beautiful body are determined Hogarth. by lines which are constantly changing their centre, and consequently never form part of a circle, but are always elliptical in character and share this quality with the contour of Greek vases," * Expression in art, on the other hand, is the imita1
We
G.
d. a. K., viii. 2. 16.

'
viii. 2.
18.
* Jb., sect. 20.
* v. 3. 3
and
4.
iv. 2.
29, see p.
208 above.
BEAUTY AND EXPRESSION.

tion of the acting
249
and suffering ^ condition of our soul and body, of passions as well as of actions in the widest sense it includes our action itself, in a narrower sense, merely the play of feature and gesture which accompanies the action. It is hostile to beauty, because it changes the bodily form in which beauty resides, and the greater this change is, the more detrimental is expression to beauty. It does not occur to him as possible that expression may modify habitual forms for the better even by the standard of mere shape. The first distinction as it presents itself to his mind, to be subsequently modified, is plainly that of repose as contrasted with motion. In the more theoretical books* of the History, which deal separately with the elements of art. Beauty is treated first, and Expression separately, afterwards. But in spite of this abrupt antagonism between the two, we find, when we turn to the analysis of actual artistic portrayal, and to the history proper, that within the limits of beauty even in the strictest sense divine beauty there falls a great variety of types ' each appropriate to the character and functions of the deity represented that the style which is called the " beautiful " par excellence is compatible with more expression than the earlier or grand style,* and that the grand style itself has not the beauty of a mere vase-outline or geometrical pattern, but is beautiful as the expression of a tranquil soul.* And thus, though according to the strict theory of formal beauty it would seem to be like pure water, best when most flavourless, and so to be an easy and simple matter, needing in the artist who is to represent it no knowledge of man nor experience of passion,* yet really " beauty without expression would be characterless, expression without beauty unpleasant,"' and for the ancient artists beauty "was the tongue on the balance of expression " * which was thus weighed out with extreme nicety, being for this is plainly the sum of the whole an element at once essential to beauty, and tending to
;
'
destroy
it.
There can be no doubt

1
that as a matter of general theory
" leidenden " by " passive," for the point is that on are shown. It more nearly = " in passion." The connection between " passion " and " passive " is one of the most curious points
We must not
translate
signs of being acted

in word-history.
2
Books
5
iv.
and
v.
^
Books
23.
iv., v., viii.
* viii. 2. 19.
viii. 2.
II.
iv. 2.
7 V. 3.
* Jo.
250
Winckelmann leaves us in this intolerable contradiction, which Goethe himself rather acquiesced in than resolved. But Winckelmann's distinctive work was that of a historian,
and
itself
not hard to see how in the concrete the matter forced his mind. He unquestionably started from the antique or abstract notion of beauty, as unity and variety manifested in the form, that is, the shape, of works belonging to the lesser arts, and of the human figure. This theory of beauty does not really account for anything more complex than our pleasure in a It geometrical pattern or the shape of a vase or moulding. is, strictly speaking, inadequate even to the simplest appreciation of the human face and figure, and lends itself to the confusion, into which Winckelmann in one passage quite unquestionably fell,^ by which there is supposed to be only one beautiful form, single and invariable all reference to individuality being excluded and this is consequently identified with the conception of beauty, which, like every intellectual conception, is single and self-identical. are not, however, to connect this passing delusion with the constant reference to ideal beauty, as though the ideal for him essentially consisted in this abstract conception mistakenly identified with a single invariable shape. On the contrary, the term " ideal " always implies in Winckelmann the exercise of educated perception upon experience, his doctrine being based on the ancient notion that supreme beauty could only be attained by combining the partial beauties of nature.* He knows that "ideal" forms, i.e. forms modified by the observer's mental activity, need not be beautiful and he thinks ' that Guido's " ideal " archangel, portrayed, according to the artist's account, after a mental image superior to experience, is much less beautiful than persons whom he has seen in reality, and betrays defective observation of nature. Thus the conception of ideal beauty does not to tend to narrow his doctrine, but to widen it.
it is
upon
We
Now his primary tendency was no doubt to identify this mere beauty of shape, which implies repose simply because
motion would involve change of outline, with the beauty or sublimity of the grand style, and we see him arguing with himself in the famous comparison with pure water * whether
*
See
p.
246 above.
* iv. 2. 35.
lb.
See
p.
249 above.
CO-ORDINATE TYPES OF BEAUTY.

this
25
can really be the case. But looking at the concrete, and arguing back from the phases of more pronounced expression, he sees that this is impossible, and that the grand style is
expressive of one state of the soul, if the beautiful style is expressive of others. And indeed, if the grand style is cognate with formal beauty through its simplicity, the beautiful style is so no less through its variety and charm of curvature, so that we get the contradictory but intelligible result which has been mentioned, viz., that true beauty the beauty of the grand style falls outside the distinctively beautiful style, while the factor hostile to beauty reaches its maximum in the style of which beauty is the distinctive attribute. Thus he breaks away from the view which would have been the natural conclusion from his premisses. He does not find that beauty is in inverse ratio to expression ; and he shows conclusively that in the concrete the two are never divorced, and that beauty breaks up into kinds and types in accordance with the mental content from which it issues. Though he fails to reduce the two elements to a common denomination, and they remain antagonistic in theory, he has done all that is necessary, in the realm of plastic art, to exhibit that correspondence between phases of the beautiful and the development of its content which holds a chief place among the data of modern aesthetic. It was thus that Winckelmann succeeded " in furnishing the mind with a new organ and new methods of study in the field of art." ^ This judgment of Hegel appears to be based upon that of Goethe, who speaks of his Gewahrwerden der Griechischen Kunst (his Finding of Greek Art^'); and it is happy for the English reader that for him too, as I have already mentioned, the memory of Winckelmann is enshrined in a work ' that belongs to our finest critical literature. vii. Our account of the data of modern aesthetic Data notntuised by the Critics, have not atj^^y fitly close at this point. tempted to take into our view those phenomena of art which had not been drawn into the focus of critical theory. have said little or nothing about painting and music. Except through the suggestive paradoxes of Diderot the former of
We
We
Hegel, Aesth. Introd., E. Tr. p. 120. Goethe, Winckelmann u. sein Jahrhundert, and Pater, Henaissatict, ssay on Winckelmann.
^
^ Cf.
* Pater's
Renaissance.
252
these distinctively modern arts was thus far hardly recognised by criticism as having a separate existence, nor does anything in the aesthetic reflection of the eighteenth century before Goethe suggest to us that Bach and HSndel lived in the first half, and Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart in the second half of that period. Before theory could deal with what was native and familiar, it had to follow the toilsome clue afforded by the inheritance of the past, because it had been brought up to believe that there alone lay the treasure house of beauty. But the treasure was found to be hidden at our own door, and in following the clue we have passed from abstract to concrete
dim
Before Lessing and Winckelmann we were in a and empty formula, but after their labours we are in the bright and populous thoroughfare of human life, which binds the ages together. This idea finds general expression in Lessing's treatise. On the Education of the Htiftmn Race (1780). And an antithesis concretely conceived is ripe for solution and the solution of a predominant antithesis carries with it the due organisation of a hundred other issues, which could not find their places till
antitheses.
half-light of tradition
;
the main framework was fitted together. Thus music, and landscape painting, and Gothic architecture, and lyric poetry, all of which were little noted by those who laid ready the materials for the building of aesthetic philosophy, soon fell into their places when the great master-thinkers came to draw the ground plan. ^^^ iaLCf^ may be added, by way of Con^*"* Indications or a elusion, to point out how, historically speaking, the aneition. ^^^^ were brought face to face with the problem and passed into the concrete theory. The year 1 764, which saw the publication of Winckelmann's History of Ancient Formative Art, saw also the publication of Kant's Observations upon the feeling of the Stiblivte and Beautiful. In 1768, the year which Winckelmann did not survive. Herder, a youth of twenty-four, dissatisfied with Lessing's Literaturbriefe which were before him, gave voice ^ to the need for another Winckelmann, who should apply in the sphere of Greek poetry and philosophy the new conception of organic and scientific history which had been inaugurated in the field of plastic art; in 1773, Goethe produced
Herder, Fragmente zur Deutschen Literaiur, Sammlung,
2, c. IV.
ROMANCE AND NATURALISM.
253
Gotz von Berlichingen, the issue, monstrous in Lessing's eyes, of Lessing's own Shakespearian revolt, and also, more important still, the incomparable little essay on the architecture of Strasburg Cathedral, which fairly raised the banner at once of " Gothic " art and characteristic expression. ^ About 1775 Diderot's Essay on Painting^ -wss written, marking almost the end of his long activity as a critic of contemporary painting, and beginning with the famous aphorism, Nahtre is never incorrect. Diderot might be called a preacher of romantic naturalism, as indeed throughout the time of these earlier antitheses, the two elements of romance and naturalism, which later sprang into polar opposition, formed a single extreme in the contrast with classical and mannered formalism and it is probable that the essential inter-dependence of romance and naturalism, or symbolism and imitation, the reason for which has been explained in an earlier chapter,* has never permitted, and will never permit, their opposition to have the fundamental character which is sometimes ascribed to it. I imagine, therefore, that Diderot's contention that all in Nature is " correct " because it is necessary in the economy of the whole, has a profounder bearing upon art than Goethe is disposed to allow. The issue whether beauty is hostile to necessity in principle, or only for our imperfect vision of the reasonable, belongs to the cesthetic of ugliness, and can only be dealt with in that connection. That up to a limit which appears to be capable oi practically indefinite expansion, the works of natural necessity have been and are being transferred from the category of the ugly to that of the beautiful is a mere matter of every-day experience. Whether this practically indefinite expansion is theoretically without an end we cannot discuss just now. In 1 781 there occurred three events of the greatest significance in the history of aesthetic. The death of Lessing severed the last link between the old and new, the Latin and the Greek Renaissance the publication of Schiller's Rauber continued the inauguration of the genius-period a reaction which was to Lessing almost as Lessing had been to Gottsched ; and the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason
; ;
First published with Herder and Moser in Deutschen i. Kunst. " Translated by Goethe in 1805 rather as a contribution to aesthetic history, and as a basis for his own comments, than as retaining substantive value.
>
Werke, xxv.
u.
Art
See
p. 158,
and
reff.
254
began the philosophical revolution which the problem and the data of aesthetic were destined to complete by their fusion. And when the Kritik der Urtheilskraft was produced in 1 790, the philosophical problem was solved in the abstract, as we shall endeavour to make clear in the following chapter and this abstract solution only needed a concrete development to become both a genuine philosophy of art, and an important
;
influence
upon
future speculation in general.
Schiller, who are of course in one aspect immediate descendants of Lessing and Winckelmann, may most conveniently be treated after and not before the Kantian aesthetic has been considered. Both of them were to some extent Schiller very profoundly affected by Kant's ideas and moreover the full weight of aesthetic knowledge and expression inherited by them and their contemporaries from the movement which I have been attempting to describe, was brought to bear on philosophy not before but after Kant had,
Thus Goethe and
almost independently, formulated the issues of aesthetic. shall therefore be following the true nexus of events by treating first of Kant, then of Schiller, Goethe, and others with reference to the eventful decade between 1 790 and 1 800, and after that we shall be able without further interruption to follow the stream of aesthetic speculation which springs from the union of Kant's abstract aesthetic with the appreciation of art and workmanship as an utterance of the human spirit and as sharing its evolution.
a (p Nature
242).
We
(1739),
The point is clearly made by David Hume in the Treatise of Human Book II. Part iii. Sect. 8. This is prior to Burke or Lord Kaimes.
CHAPTER
KANT
His Relation to
X.
THE
PROBLEM BROUGHT TO A FOCUS.
^' ^^^ ^^.ta of modern aesthetic, described in the preceding chapter, produced no considerable effect upon Kant's philosophy. His work lay wholly in the path of metaphysical speculation, and before its point of junction with the concrete evolutionary idea. The history of thought can show no more dramatic spectacle than that of this great intellectual pioneer beating out his track for forty years in the wilderness of technical philosophy, and bringing his people at last to the entrance upon a new world of free and humanizing culture, which, so far as we can tell, he never
theProwem
thoroughly
made
his
own.
his most and therefore long after the death of Winckelmann, yet he was born (1724) five years earlier than the former and only seven years after the latter. The title of his first work on aesthetic, Observations on the feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful, seems to show that Burke's Essay (1756) had been instrumental in drawing and its date (1764) being earlier his attention to the subject than that of Winckelmann's " History," and earlier than
We must remember that although
Kant published
famous works
after the death of Lessing,
of the Laocoon, indicates that his aesthetic interest had taken its bent before the new renaissance had well His great aesthetic treatise of 1790, The Critique begun.
fhat
of
the
Power of Judgment,
follows this
same
division into the
and while explicitly referring to Sublime and the indicates no interest whatever in the contemBurke's Essay porary movement of archaeology and art-criticism. We trace in it indeed here and there an idea drawn from Rousseau, or but these are exceptions find an observation of De Saussure prove the rule, for, wide as his reading was, Kant prethat ferred to rely on facts of nature and humanity freshly observed, whether by himself or others, rather than on secondary theory dealing with books and art.
Beautiful,
;
266
256
HISTORY OF AESTHETIC.
His inquiries into the beautiful may thus have assumed their immediate form owing to suggestions in Burke and similar writers, and could not but show traces of the ideas fermenting around him. But the conditions that invested these inquiries with supreme importance at this particular crisis were not derived from preceding or contemporary art-theory, but from that movement of general philosophy which I have endeavoured to depict as determining the " problem of modern aesthetic." It was after Kant had brought into suggestive order the factors of this movement, using as a chief instrument in the work the ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, that an extraordinarily rapid and fortunate succession of great minds re-organised the data of art and learning by the help of his conceptions, and thus founded in one of its forms the concrete idealism which really governs alike the aesthetic and the metaphysic of the nineteenth century. The resolution of the given the marantithesis between the mediaeval and the antique riage of Faust and Helena from which there sprang the completed modern spirit, was performed in great part independently of philosophy proper, and was taken into the sweep of metaphysical speculation at a point subsequent to the completion of Kant's system, by which the same antithesis had been resolved in other and more abstract forms. ^' ^" ^^^ lifelong labour for the re-organisation Place of the ^jtheticProwem of philosophy, Kant may be said to have aimed at s ys em. ^îree cardinal points, dictated to him by the converging movements of thought in the focus of which he placed himself. First, he desired to justify the conception of a natural order secondly, the conception of a moral order and thirdly, the conception of compatibility between the natural and the moral order. The first of these problems was imposed upon, him by Hume, and formed the substance of the Critique of Pure Reason ; the second was a legacy from the Wolffian school, and was treated in the Critique of Practical Reason ; the third necessarily arose out of the relation between the other two, emphasised by the distinctively modern recognition, which eighteenth century enlightenment exaggerated, that the sentient and intelligent individual has indefeasible claims both of sense and of rational freedom. And although the formal compatibility of nature and reason had been established by Kant, as he believed, in the negative demarcation between them which the two first Critiques expounded, it was inevitable
THE "CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON,"
257
that he should subsequently be led on to suggest some more positive conciliation. This attempt was made in the Critigtie of the Power of Judgmenty published in 1790, a date to be remembered in connection with the remarkable literary history of the following decade. The import of the two earlier Critiques may be indicated in popular language, simply and solely in order to explain Kant's relation- to aesthetic theory, somewhat as follows. When we examine the system of the physical sciences with reference to its logical texture, we at once become aware that in spite of its immense variety of object-matter it is permeated by certain common characteristics which appear inseparable from its intellectual existence. Such are, in modern phrase, the law of the uniformity of nature in its most formal rendering, and the law of Sufficient Reason with its sub-form the law of Causation, not to speak of the more sensuous abstractions of space and time. The use of these principles, by whatever name we call them, is found to be merely another name for the use of our own intelligence and perception, and, apart from the theory of mind, we are not in the habit of asking questions as to where we get them or by what right we apply tnem. If challenged on the subject to-day we should probably attempt to show, resting our demonstration upon the analysis of knowledge, that we cannot do the work of science without some such principles, and that we find no warrant in experience for the notion, which is implied in questioning their validity, that some alternative is open to us by which, discarding them, we might arrive at less artificial elements of
knowledge.
mode of argument, which expresses the result on our minds of such an attempt as that made by Mill to demonthis
Now
seems to correspond with of the Critigue of Pure Reason, when stripped the substance of the technical details and qualifications which arose out of the peculiar speculative conditions of the time. Taken quite strictly, however, such an argument carries us but a short way. The vital relation in which it places intelligence to the matter of perception is very narrowly It leaves us in an intolerable perplexity as circumscribed. regards the element of experience over which we have no control the element in physical reality which is undetermined and unexplained by the formal postulates of intellistrate the postulates of experience,
258
gence. see that natural knowledge, in as far as it comes to us at all, forms itself by necessary processes into a conception of parts dependent upon one another in endless succession and co-existence. What we do not see is any ground whatever for supposing that the natural reality thus brought before our minds, a reality which is taken to include our own sentient and emotional nature, is in any way bound to continue in accord with our intelligence, or in the smallest degree to take account of our moral or eudsemonistic requirements. "In knowledge thus limited to the necessary interconnection of parts, within a system not known and not justifiably to be divined as a whole, we have the operation of what Kant chose to call the Understanding, which we may interpret to ourselves by comparing it with the " eye of science," for which no catastrophe either moral or material is disorder, so long as its factors are taken to be connected according to the law of Causation.^ The Critique of Pure Reason is a demonstration that theoretical knowledge is limited to t]iis " Understanding"
We
The as operative within the sphere of possible perception. whole can be known only in its parts and not as a whole. Therefore the Reason, or that aspect of thought in which it implies, for every part, a whole to which it must be related
its import must lie, has no strictly theoretical and cannot be the source of any theoretical propositions. It has no place within perceptive experience,^ for the whole as a whole cannot appear there nor outside perceptive experience, for how could definite knowledge of the whole come into being in a region where there is ex hypothesi no
and
in
which
function,
perception of the parts ? Ideas of the Reason, therefore, that is ideas concerning the nature of the universe as a whole, such as those of God and Freedom, are incapable of theoretical verification, whether within perceptive experience or beyond it. For pure theory gives us a world of natural
'
See Prof. Huxley {Contemp. Review, February, 1887) quoted and
criti-
cised in the author's Logic, ii. 214. * I omit at this point the " regulative " application of Ideas of Reason to knowledge, by which the inquirer is led to look for so much material order in the objects of knowledge as may make science possible, though he must not This principle is in fact a assert theoretically that there is such order. material postulate of knowledge, parallel to Mill's " Uniformity " if interpreted to mean not merely " is " but " knowledge is possible," and being inserted in the Critique of Pure Reason is a modification of Kant's
dualism ab
initio.
"CRITIQUE OF THE PRACTICAL REASON.
259
necessity, and outside it nothing can be with theoretical definiteness affirmed or denied. The abstract distinction between the whole and the part in thinking being once assumed, this conclusion is inevitable. If we ask why the Understanding apart from the Reason did not show itself as empty a fiction as the Reason apart from the Understanding, the answer is that in approaching any system through a study of its parts we insensibly subordinatd them to a makeshift or imperfect whole, such, for example, as/ the universe taken to be a physical reality endless in space and time. Thus we are able to order our experiences pro-j visionally, and leave out of sight the difficulties which attach Hence it has been said by Hegel to their aspect of totality.
with practical truth, "Understanding without Reason thing. Reason without Understanding is nothing."
is
We
someneed
not plume ourselves to-day on seeing through the impossibility of Kant's abstraction, until we are quite sure that we have ourselves understood how all necessary connection must be founded in the relation of part to part within some given
reality.
So far then, except for the regulative use of the ideas of Reason within experience, we have a purely negative demarcation between the world of natural necessity and the world Plainly, Reason is at work in the conof rational freedom.
ception of both worlds, but in forms at
patible.
first
sight incom-
In the Critique of the Practical Reason we find the complementary side of the demarcation. We all know that in order to live at all we must assume, whether we profess them or not, certain simple articles of faith, say, that food will nourish, that language will retain its meaning, that men will not turn to tigers without cause or warning, and in short that From some the acts necessary to be done are also possible. such elementary standpoint we may take a fairly appreciative view of Kant's Practical Reason, which has been so ridicuAs a being with a will, man cannot avoid lously parodied. putting before him certain aims and principles of conduct. Now conduct issues out into the world of physical reality, and is in fact, as we now recognise, through the human organism,, in the closest correspondence with that world and its necessiBut according to the principles of the former Critique ties. we can make no theoretical propositions whatever about the
260
possibility or impossibility of realising man's will within the world of physical reality, nor, therefore, about the existence
of God, nor the truth of Freedom and Immortality. Nevertheless these unaffirmed ideas of the Reason, under which it envisages the nature of the universe as a whole having a unity beyond perceptive experience, are capable of guiding the human being in his practical attitude to life. He is not to say how, though he may say that their objects are real but he is to make it his aim to realise life in accordance with them. Thus, if we translate the essence of the matter into modern terms, we find that the appeal is simply to the moral order as found to be practically realisable in the moral life. This alone the moral life as a meeting-point of reason and nature which displays their compatibility in act is what we should call a reality. Such a view should not be unintelligible today, for in spite of its self-contradictions it is very widely held. Those who, believing in a universe that as a whole is in no way relevant to any rational end, nevertheless think it practically certain that morality is possible and life, with its implied reference to a nobler earthly future, is worth living, are in a position to appreciate Kant's doctrine of the Practical Reason. The separate worlds of Nature and of Freedom were thus established on the strength of two distinguishable orders of facts the facts of science and those of the moral life and all proof of their incompatibility was supposed to be rendered impossible by the strict negative demarcation between them, that is, by a necessity of ignorance. It was not likely that such a position would be acquiesced in without an attempt to complete it by a reconciliation between the two worlds. The need could not be more strikingly stated than in the following passage from the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. " There^ is thus a gulf which we cannot see across between the territory of the conception of Nature, that is, the sensuous, and the territory of the conception of Freedom, that is, the supra-sensuous, so that from the former to the latter (by means, that is to say, of the theoretical use of Reason) there is no passage possible, just as if they were two different worlds of which the former can have no influence on the
;
Kritik
d. Urtheilskraft,
Werke,
4. 14.
"critique of the power of judgment."

latter.
261
on the
Nevertheless the latter might to have an influence former, that is to say, the conception of Freedom otight to realise within the world of sense the aim imposed by its laws and consequently, Nature must be thought of in such a way that the law-abidingness of its form may be compatible at least with the possibility of the ends, imposed by laws of freedom, which are to be effected within it. Therefore there must after all be a ground of the unity of the supra- sensuous which lies at the root of Nature with that which the conception of Freedom practically contains a ground the conception of which, although unable to attain cognition of it (the ground) either in theory or in practice, and therefore possessing no peculiar territory, nevertheless makes possible a transition from the mode of thinking dictated by the principles of the one world to that dictated by the principles of the other world." To be the meeting point of these two worlds, the representative of reason in the world of sense, and of sense in the world of reason, is the high position which Kant is here preparing to assign to the content of the aesthetic and teleoThis content coincides, as we shall see, logical judgment. with the sublime and beautiful in reality and in art, and the The pre-eminent importance products of organic nature. thus assigned to real objects in which an idea seems indissolubly embodied, was the germ from which concrete idealism
;
was
to spring.
3. The reasons for finding the required meeting-point in the exercise of the power of judgment Answer to the sound very stranare in Kant's technical language. ' Problem. _,, r t ^ l ..u The power of Judgment, he says, is the connecting link between the Understanding and the Reason, as the feeling of pleasure and pain is between the faculties of knowledge and of desire (will). The power of judgment is reflective, not
jKe^'iS
..
determinant, and prescribes to itself the conception of purposiveness in nature, as if nature in all its variety had had a unity imposed upon it by an Intelligence, such as to conform This conformity to our cognition or power to our cognition. of apprehension produces when perceived a feeling of pleasure wholly distinct from that which belongs to conformity with our desires. This feeling of pleasure is the predicate in the aesthetic judgment, and being pleasure in the presentation of an object by reason of its form only, is universal though sub-
262
jective.
When the predicate is not a feeling of pleasure but a relation to the idea of an end, then we have the teleological and not the aesthetic judgment. Omitting the question of teleological judgment, we mayparaphrase this technical exposition as follows. Every judgment may be regarded as placing parts in relation to a whole. Although, if we separate the Understanding, and the Reason, there cannot but be Judgment in each of them yet, in fact, as we have seen, this separation except as a matter of degree, is pure fiction. What is meant therefore by the intermediacy of the power of Judgment between Understanding and Reason is merely that all judgment is synthesis, and therefore judgment par excellence, in its most central types, always has a tendency to gather up the relations of parts, which are supposed to be the sphere of the Understanding, in subordination to a unity or totality, which is supposed to correspond to the point of view emphasised by " Reason." And such a unity of parts undoubtedly shades off by degrees into a working con;
ception of purposiveness, as is sufficiently shown by considering the great predominance of the idea of purpose in the determination of the significant names applied to what we call ** things." It is doubtful if the conception of an individual "thing" would exist apart from organic and artificial products. It is natural therefore to give the title of Judgment emphatically to the perception of characteristic form in objects, as at least a notable case of the synthesis of parts into a whole. It is thus that the power of Judgment is taken to be inter-
mediate between Understanding and Reason, and to assume

the idea of purposiveness for the inseparable or a priori principle that guides its reflections. The feeling of pleasure and pain, again, is regarded as a connecting link between the faculty of cognition and that of will or desire, apparently because it is a characteristic which is commonly associated with action or practical interest, and when found as mere pleasure and pain, i.e., as free from such interest or satisfaction, is regarded as a half-way house between action and theory. The discussion at some points^ reminds us of Aristotle's reference to the pleasure which we feel in the sheer activity of recognition. But Kant means more than this. He means that a conformity is brought to
^
JEinleitung, Sect. vi.
THE ESTHETIC PARADOXES.

light
263
between the perception of the object and the faculties of the subject, such that the subject is harmoniously affected in respect of the relation between fancy and understanding. must assume this to mean that the image presented to fancy or pictorial perception in some way meets the needs, or accommodates itself to the rules of the understanding. Our difficulty is here and will be throughout to see how the inclividualities of different beautiful objects are allowed for by these formulae. Are different harmonies of fancy and understanding correlative to different types of beauty ? Thus aesthetic pleasure combines the characteristics of desire and knowledge, as the nature of judgment combines in the idea of purposiveness those of the reason (unity) and the understanding (diversity or dissociation). This seems to be why the "aesthetic judgment " is selected as the guide to the required meeting-point of Nature and Freedom, Understanding and Reason, the sensuous and the intelligible. The intermediate position of the aesthetic judgment is strikingly exhibited in the four paradoxes, corresponding to the four heads of categories employed in the Critique of Pure will Reason, by which Kant determines its essence. place these paradoxes side by side. In Quality, the Judgment of Taste is aesthetic; that is to say, the pleasure which forms its predicate, is apart from all Interest is defined to be pleasure in the idea of the interest. It is contrasted with pleasure in the existence of an object. mere presentation or sensuous idea of the object. Thus the beautiful is at once sharply distinguished from the pleasant and the good, which correspond to the lower and higher forms of the appetitive faculty. For in both its forms the appetitive
We
We
faculty involves
an "
interest."
In the Quantity and Modality of the judgment of taste the beautiful is considered as the object of a pleasure which is universal and necessary, but without the intervention of a reFor this reason the universality and necessity flective idea. I have are both of them subjective and not objective. ranked these two points together, though Kant does not, because according to modern logic we hardly care to distinguish between Quantity and Modality or between Universality
and Necessity.
;
In the Quantity of the judgment beauty is distinguished from the pleasant by its from the pleasant and the good
264
universality for we demand agreement in the judgment of beauty, though there is no disputing about tastes in food or
drink
lity,
and from the good by the absence of a

distinctions are not repeated under the The result would plainly be the same.
reflective idea.
These
head of Moda-
In respect of the Relation which the judgment of taste the beautiful is the form of purposiveness in an object, in as far as this can be perceived without the idea of an end. Once more then, the beautiful is separated from the and pleasant, which involves a distinct subjective purpose from the good, because this involves the idea of an end, whether external to the object as in the case of utility, or immanent in the object as in the case of perfection. Perfection, therefore, even when confusedly thought, is not as the Wolffian school supposed, the same as the beautiful, but is different in kind. cannot ascribe perfection to an object, however confusedly, without applying to it, as the standard of judgment, some idea of an end. The "form of purposiveness" lies primarily, for Kant, in a harmonious relation to our faculties of imagination and understanding, so that we are not sure at first sight whether to take it to be purely accidental or to depend on that appearance of organic unity in an object which is suggested to us by such a phrase as "purposiveness without a purpose." It seems worth while to reproduce the note which shows how Kant himself understood his paradox.
implies,
;
We
" It^ might be adduced as an example that tells against this explanation (of beauty), that there are things in which we see a purposive form without recognising a purpose in them for instance, the stone instruments found in ancient tumuli, with a hole in them as if for a handle, whose shape clearly shows a purposiveness the actual purpose of which we do not know which nevertheless are not called beautiful. But the fact that we regard them as productions of art \sic, we must take it to mean industrial art] is enough to force us to admit that we refer their shape to some purpose and to a definite end. So there is absolutely no immediate pleasure in the perception of them. But a flower, for instance a tulip, is considered beautiful, because a certain purposiveness is found in the perception of it, which is not, within our act of judging, re-
Krit. d. Urtheilskraft, p. 87 footnote.
THE iESTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS.

ferred to
265
any end." It appears then, that 'the harmony of perception depends on a perception of harmony, although no explicit proposition can be made about the objective nature of the latter. The place and nature of the jesthetic consciousness is finally determined for philosophy by these four paradoxes. Only they set down the judgment of taste as "subjective," a limitation which it remained for Kant's successors explicitly
to remove.
"^^^ sesthetic consciousness has now received negative definition. It is plainly marked off from the region of abstract intelligence on the one hand, and from that of sensuous gratification and moral satisfaction on the other. If the latter pair of contrasts, those between sesthetic interest and the two forms of practical inDemarcation of
'"
iEsthotio Con- its
final
terest, depend on a common-sense distinction (between existence and appearance) which is not easily translated into exact psychical terms, it will be found that Kant himself furnishes the indication by which the antithesis can be made good. The peculiarity of sesthetic interest, which presented such difficulties to the greatest of the ancients, has never been mistaken by serious thinkers since thus trenchantly formumay fairly assent to Hegel's verdict, lated by Kant.
We
when he finds in the introduction to the Critiqice of the Power of Judgment "the first rational word concerning
beauty."^
Moreover, the eesthetic consciousness is ,' . recognised its positive essence as the All that we êeting-point of sense and reason. have thus far learnt about it has pointed to this conclusion, but Kant, with his usual calm audacity, was the first to lay down the principles which felicitously describe our everyday experience of the beautiful, while in the light of abstract metaphysic they appear to be the flattest self-contradictions. feeling of pleasure which has no relation to practical interest, which depends on the purposiveness of a perceived content, and lays claim to universality and necessity, though
Fosltive Essence of Esthetic consciousness,
,^.
ii.
now
m
.
" i Hist, of Philosophy, iii. 543. He has just quoted the sentence, An object is beautiful, the form of which (not the material element, /.., sensation-stimulus, of its perception) is judged to be the ground of the pleasure
taken in the image of such an object."
266
remaining
all
the time a pure feeling, wholly free from explicit conceptions of purpose or class or antecedent and consequent,' such a feeling is a sheer impossibility alike to a sensationalist and to an intellectualist philosophy. It is not a clarified form of sense-gratification it is not a confused idea of perfection these are merely efforts to explain it upon wholly inadequate Such bases. It is bond fide feeling, and bond fide reasonable. It involves a hopeless is the paradox which Kant propounds. " no thoroughfare," unless there is a unity, not accidental but inherent, between feeling, sense, or nature on the one hand, and reason, intelligence, or freedom on the other. iii. But upon all these other contradictions he Its "Subjectivity." superimposes a limitation which ostensibly withdraws the sense of beauty from the central position which at first sight he is supposed to claim for it. are to bear in mind throughout that the judgment of taste is " subjective."
We
very phrase "judgment of taste " points to the partly British ancestry of Kant's doctrine, and to the sensationalist and empirical prejudices out of which he had to raise the whole question. The "judgment of taste" contributes in
The
no way to cognition. It simply expresses a felt harmony in the play of our own powers on occasion of a certain perception. I have already touched on the issue how far the
felt
harmony
in us implies a
in
harmony
in the object.
At
first
sight
however, and
his general language,
Kant guards
himself most anxiously against any such inference. constantly meet with such expressions as " the universal subjective validity of the pleasure which we attach to the idea of an object which we call beautiful." can a feeling that has universal validity remain subjective in the sense wkick excludes objective ? Is not the whole idea a pure self-contradiction ? Yet there was no going back. Kant was right to be tenacious of his point. Beauty is subjective it exists in and for a percipient and not otherwise. But its subjectivity is no bar to its being objective as well. Kant says this in effect, but not in set terms. When it was said, the limitation of abstract subjectivity was removed, and the two worlds of dualistic tradition had their frontiers broken down.
We
How
Thus
*
far
we
is
see the
Judgment of Taste recognised as a

li
Necessity
the relation of antecedent and consequent in judgment, "
A, then B."
THE JUDGMENT OF
TASTE.
267
mental phenomenon carrying a number of contradictory attributes, only to be conciliated by assumptions which we may suggest, but cannot afifirm, much less demonstrate. have now to observe the development of this recognition, first in thfe hands of Kant himself and then in those of his successors, into the conception of a concrete unity, demonstrated
We
by
aesthetic science in the appreciative and productive sense of beauty, and by other philosophic methods in the history of nature and man. The immanence of the idea in reality is the root of objective idealism, and of this immanence the sesthetic perception furnishes the simplest and most striking example. Conflict of AD. 4. Kant's starting-point in aesthetic theory was, êto*taKMfvB as we have seen, the judgment of taste, which iEstheuc. depends upon a de facto conformity between the
and that which is perceived. Here we have the of an aesthetic of feeling and an aesthetic of pure form, two abstract extremes which are really inseparable. The unanalysed datum of disinterested pleasure in certain perceptions is an aspect of the unanalysed datum that certain perceptions give disinterested pleasure. These views, by
percipient
common germ
their
common opposition
;
to discursive rationalism in aesthetic
judgment, have the merit of vindicating ihe immediateness oi aesthetic perception but by confusing this concrete immediateness with the absence of any significance that can be analysed by theory, they condemn the beautiful to absolute bareness
of character and import. So long as Kant is absolutely true to his principle that without abstract conceptions there can be no objective judgment, and that beauty can involve no abstract conceptions, it follows that the pleasure of beauty, though possessing the formal attributes of reason disinterestedness, universality, necessity is yet ex hypothesi destitute of content, that is to say, destitute of any definite implication as to the positive import of those forms, on the contemplation of which aesthetic pleasure arises. Now Kant never brings himself to admit that the judgment of taste can be objective, but he tampers to some extent, with both of the principles which prevent him from admitting it. Without asserting that there can be objective judgment in the absence of definite abstract ideas, he admits a pregnant import into the form of beauty, through its relation to indefinite
268
ideas ;^ without admitting that taste can involve intellectual conceptions, he both qualifies it as an organ of communicable feeling, and distinguishes its higher forms by close association It is only for the sake of with objective and abstract ideas. his thesis that he sets down the judgment of taste, when thus associated, as "impure." Isolated tones and colours raise the difficulty at once. Have they aesthetic form ? If they have, in what can it. be said to consist If they have not, their claim to beauty, as And in this distinct from sensuous pleasantness, is annihilated. latter case an exceedingly hazardous Sorites is received into the theory. If there are isolated sensations, such as enter into the beautiful, which have only pleasantness and no beauty, where does beauty begin to arise out of pleasantness ? Kant is prepared in some degree to assign pregnant form to simple tones and colours. This is the first lodgment effected by concrete import within his abstract judgment of taste. They are beautiful, he says, only because and in so far as they are^wrig, which he explains as meaning free from pei-turbation by mixture. Mixed colours and tones, he actually ventures to say, are not (in this sense) beautiful. This explanation, which reminds us of Plato, would not bear interpretation either by physical analysis or by direct perception. The eye and ear do not necessarily tell us which colours and sounds have the most uniform physical causes nor, if either sense or science detects a mixture of tones or spectrum colours, do we necessarily judge that mixture to be devoid of sesthetic purity, much less of aesthetic beauty. Would any unbiassed perception select a primary colour (red, green, or violet) or the tone of a tuning-fork (one of the few sounds that are fairly free from harmonics) as a type of purity ? It is perhaps some consciousness of this difficulty that drives Kant to a further suggestion, which in a modified shape has still a tendency to revive. Perhaps, he suggests, the rhythmical pulsations, which are the exciting cause ^ of tones and colours, may not merely have their effect on the organ of sense, but be actually perceived by the mind (which Kant " still greatly doubts "). In that case colour and tone
.'*
See Antinomie
d.
Geschmacks, and
its
solution,
K.
d.
U.,
213
ff.
Kant
refers to
Euler for the physical theory.
PURITY.
269
have formal quality as

beautiful in their
It
sity, in
unities of
a manifold, and thus are
own
right.
can hardly be doubted that the unity, or unity in diverwhich Kant thus endeavours to find the form of simple perceptions, has in his mind a reference to the conception of totality, which is an idea of the reason going beyond experience, and therefore indefinite for knowledge, though regulative for practice. shall see that aesthetic ideas are in his view pendants to ideas of Reason. But he is not quite sure whether this doctrine of significant form will work, and is partly inclined to abandon the beauty of colour as such, and to treat it as merely an ocular stimulus that enhances the visibility and value of line. Here we pass into a confusion between metaphysical " form " as the relation of parts in a significant whole, and " form " as the shape of visible bodies. It is plain that form in the metaphysical and aesthetic sense includes the harmonies of colour-composition, no less than those of linear or solid contour. If we grant, what is very doubtful, that single tones or colours can ever be considered in their isolation, their aesthetic quality as thus isolated depends upon a great variety of subtle suggestions,^ among which the idea of purity is only one, being a species of unity in variety, and not arising from the mere fact of such unity. Ruskin's account of purity^ shows how much definite significance this idea contains. The above is a typical case of Kant's vacillation between safe adherence to the abstract datum of aesthetic pleasure, and the sense that if he cannot find a content for it, his doctrine of form becomes
We
inane.
The case which in Plato ranks along with single tones and colours, that of very elementary geometrical figures, is rejected from the sphere of beauty by. Kant. The abstract conception is too nearly implied in them, he thinks, to harmonise with the unreflective character of beauty. Here again he shows a
needless dread of a specific content. The abstract conception behind them, so to speak, cannot prevent them from affording a slight degree of aesthetic pleasure to direct perception, in
virtue of their presentation of certain qualities.
* See Baldwin Brown, The Fine Arts, Sect. 98. Kant himself develops the moral meaning which we find in colours and tones, " Courage, joyful-
ness," etc.
*
Mod. Painters,
vol.
ii.
p.
73
ff.
270
Further, the doctrine ^ of free and dependent beauty, the latter including the ideal, exhibits in a striking light the difficulty which pressed upon Kant when he tried to associate a positive import with the judgment of taste. " Free " beauty rests on no definite conception, and the judgment of taste that appreciates it is pure. " Dependent beauty is conditioned by the definite conception of an end, and therefore so far violates the principle of purposiveness without a purpose, and the judgment of taste that appreciates it falls short of purity. Not only the lowest beauty, which subsequent philosophy would agree in calling subservient, but also the highest is ranked as dependent in virtue of this distinction. Architecture is plainly subordinate to use, and we are not surprised to find the beauty of buildings set down as dependent beauty. Rather it surprises us to be told that decorative art such as pattern-designing is " free " because it is not bound to represhould sent any object conditioned by a positive idea. naturally set down decoration as attached on the whole to architecture and governed by human use, and therefore, like architecture, dependent. But even architecture, Kant will insist, as having a very wide range of possible purposes, is although strictly dependent, yet free in comparison with ideal beauty. Natural beauty, except in those objects which are chiefly considered qua useful to man such as the horse, or the [fruit] tree is free. must note the reason of this, which is simply that we cannot impose upon it any idea of a purpose. The beauty of a flower is free, for " no one but the botanist knows what a flower is meant to be (" Waseine Blume fur ein Ding sein soil "), and in judging of its beauty even he takes no account of this." I imagine that we should distinguish between knowledge of the purpose as enabling us to pronounce upon utility or perfection, which we should admit to be of no aesthetic value, and knowledge of the purpose as enabling us to appreciate organic unity, which we should take to be an enrichment of aesthetic insight. No one but a botanist, I should certainly maintain, can really feel the beauty of flowers. If their beauty is " free " then, in comparison with that of a house or church, it is not because we are ignorant of their purpose, nor
We
We
Kr.
d.
U., Sectt. 16
and
17.
IDEAL AS "NORMAL IDEA.
27
again, as in great works of art, because their purpose is expression for expression's sake, but because what we must call their purpose is one with their own existence, and though usually conditioned by other lives ^ is not at any point cut in two by its relation to them. For us, therefore, the flower is harmoniously expressive throughout, in virtue of being a reasonable unity. AH objects, even works of art, are conditioned by external agencies it is not the fact of a relation to condition or purpose, but the marked conflict of purposes within the system which man's will has power to introduce, that stamps the mark of subserviency on the decorated instruments
;
of
human
life.
least free of all, according to Kant, is the beauty which is capable of an ideal. There can be no ideal either of the lower dependent beauty, or of the intermeideal can only be fixed by objective diate free beauty. purposiveness, and objective purposiveness is ex hypothesi outside beauty, and can never be judged of by a pure judgment of taste, but only by one which is partly intellectualised. Ideal ineans the presentation or imagination of a particular being as adequate to an idea of the reason. The ideal then has two elements. First, there is the unknown type, or intention of nature, in every race of men or Such a type is represented through the automatic animals. work of the imagination, which strikes an average of shapes out of the thousands of individuals that have been seen. This process is illustrated by a comparison to optical images thrown upon one another, which suggests Mr. Gallon's method of Every breed of animals will pregeneralised photographs. sent, and every race of men will present and possess, a " normal idea " thus constituted and this will form the foundation or conditio sine qua non of beautiful presentation in and for Both this idea of an average as the key to the that race. intention of nature, and the allusion to the taste of negroes and Chinese as probably conditioned by the type familiar to them, remind us of Reynolds in the Idler, and point forward " taste " on this very ground. to Hegel; who depreciates mere what we have to note is his attiAnd in Kant's treatment His language suggests that he tude to the " normal idea." thought at first, as Reynolds did, that this "idea" was the
Most dependent and
An
Those of insects.
272
ideal of beauty
for
it
editions of this Critique,
appears that he called it so in the earliei and the phrase " Normal idea oi " still occurs in the discussion. But he subsequently beauty saw how litrie import this average type possessed, and the Critique now expressly says that it can contain nothing characteristic ^ of a person, is not beautiful but merely correct,* and that the average regularity of feature, which it brings out in man, usually indicates mediocrity of mind. The normal pro;
portions which
sine
this,
qua
exhibits are however the limit or condition non upon which true beauty is founded.
it
The
ideal of Beauty in the strict sense is something beyond and has meaning only in the human race. It consists in
the revelation of moral import through bodily manifestation in Without this the object cannot give univerthe human form. sal and positive pleasure as distinct from the mere customary and negative pleasantness of the " correct." It is the highest problem of the artist, and requires pure ideas of reason, and But as the standard thus set great powers of imagination. of man as an end, it follows involves a definite conception that "judgment by such a standard can never be purely cEsthetic, and judgment according to an ideal of beauty is no mere judgment of taste." Beauty judged according to an And thus it ideal is therefore not free but dependent beauty. only just misses being admitted as objective for, though not objective qua beauty, it is objective in virtue of that conception which makes it dependent. Now if beauty is regarded as subservient to morality, or is judged by the standard of specifically moral ideas, it is beyond a doubt unfree or dependent. But if the content of life and reason is taken into beauty and perceived not as the expression of morality, but as the utterance in another form of that reasonableness which is also to be found in morality, then we for there first destroy the restriction of ideal beauty to man and we secondly break down is reasonableness in all nature the extraordinary paradox that the highest beauty is the least That beauty which is the largest and deepest revelation free. of spiritual power is not the most dependent but the freest beauty, because it implies no purpose whatever excepting that
;
^ The " characteristic," the central idea of modern aesthetic, had been emphasised in Goethe's Deutsche Baukunst, 1780 j but its appearance in Kant is noteworthy. 2 Schulgeruht.
THE SYMBOL.
which constitutes
273
its own inmost nature, the expression of reason in sensuous form. It is plain that Kant felt this and practically recognised the true rank of such beauty, but was baffled in attempting to include it in his formal datum, the
judgment of Yet with

he has
taste.
his strange persistence, approaching his subject like a beleaguered city by sapping up to it on different sides,
still a great deal in reserve that affects this unacknowledged objectivity of the judgment of taste. He is clear, for example, that taste involves a " common sense," not the understanding which employs abstract ideas, but some kind of common feeling. And this, he thinks, may perhaps in the last resort represent a demand of the reason that sense is to be made harmonious or congruous in its utterances.^ At least the communicability which is distinctive of aesthetic feeling gives it a high social interest from the most primitive times, although this is not an interest in beauty as such. In this discussion we find at once an anticipation and a criticism of an important modern view, that which lays stress on the social
and
festal origin of art.^
Moreover, when he comes to consider what must be added

productive capacity in fine art, "genius," a conception in which he analyses, without any historical reference whatever, the watchword of the "period of genius" then hardly gone by. The essence of genius he finds in the power to portray aesthetic ideas and aesthetic ideas are imaginative presentations such that no conception is able to exhaust their significance. In this they are the counterpart of ideas of the reason,' to which no presentation can be adequate. If we ask how the aesthetic idea is the counterpart of the idea or postulate of reason, we find that the relation is exsymbol is for plained by a definite doctrine of symbolism.* him a perception or presentation which represents a conception neither conventionally as a mere sign, nor directly but in the abstract as a " scheme," but indirectly though appropriately through a similarity between the rules which govern our reflection in the "symbol" and in the thing (or idea) symbolised. Thus when we think of a monarchical state as an
to taste in order to
make up
he decides that
this is
Kr.
d. U., p. 92.
3
^ Prof.
Brown, The Fine Arts, Bk.

*
i.
Pp. 185-6.
P. 231.
274
organism
is
if
the system
is constitutional, and as a machine if it organism and machine are symbols, the resemblance to the monarchical state depending in each case on the principle of cohesion which we impute to the things com-
despotic,
pared.
In this sense of symbolism Beauty is a symbol of the moral and this order is. the intelligible or supra-sensuous reality to which the judgment of taste ultimately points. It is this relation which expresses itself in the semi-rational nature ascribed to beauty in the four paradoxes. On this ground, again, interest in the beauty of nature is the sign of a good mind, because the reason is concerned that its ideas or demands shall not only have validity but find objective reality within the world of sense. And the traces of conformity in nature to a disinterested judgment in us, which constitute natural beauty and testify to an underlying unity between nature and the moral order, are therefore of interest to human thought. should now extend this idea to the beauty of Art but it is remarkable that Kant, probably under Rousseau's influence, explicitly refuses to do so, thinking of art not as a revelation of existing beauty, but as made to conform to our ends and too often to flatter our egoism. In all this account of beauty, which accords to it the highest significance, the term objective is still lacking but it is obvious that nothing of objectivity is lacking except the name. And with the objectivity thus practically conceded, there come in significance, and the characteristic, and natural as opposed to conventional symbolism. All these were the watchwords of the time just beginning, as taste and beauty had been the watchwords of that which had gone by. In general, including both nature and art, beauty is for Kant the expression of aesthetic ideas, ^ which means, as we have seen, the suggestion in sensuous form, of demands or aspirations or principles of reason which no such perception can completely and adequately contain. have seen that in his genercd theory <."v-v^_j' ^= ^ ^ & . Kange and Sub- T^ 5Kant is lorced to admit a concrete import into diYisionof "^^Mpuon.^'' what was at first an unanalysable deliverance of feeling. How far, we must now enquire, does he
order,^
We
We
.
^ " Sittlichkeit," p. 232. Even in Kant this word has not quite the isolated * P. 192. personal reference of our English term " morality."
THE SUBLIME.
275
himself contribute to determining the actual field of aesthetic perception, and the relation between its content and the sensuous media in which it can be clothed ? The answer to this enquiry is in the doctrine of the sublime and the classification of the arts. Kant's account of the sublime is interposed i, of^ûme. between two parts of his account of the beautiful, and appears to have had the effect of forcing upon his mind the deeper symbolic character in beauty which at first he was disposed to find only in sublimity. Historically speaking, his theory was probably occasioned by that of Burke, and on its spiritual side might very well have been suggested by a single remark of Winckelmann, whose name, however, so far as 1 am aware, does not occur in Kant. Its subsequent effect may be traced in Hegel's conception both of symbolic and of romantic art, and more generally, it was the true forerunner of all aesthetic theory which brings apparent ugliness within the frontier of beauty. For Kant's allusion in another context to the ugly as capable of being beautifully portrayed in art is a weak survival of Lessing's ideas, and has little to do with the growing modern sympathy for what is undisguisedly sombre, wild, or terrible. The firm and plain basis of Burke's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime was, it will be remembered, the difference between the pleasantness of pleasure and the It is undoubtedly upon this foundation pleasantness of pain. his theory, in which fear, corresponding to that Kant erects Burke's " passions relating to self-preservation, which turn mostly on pain or danger," suggests a principal case of subWinckelmann's remark that in looking upon the sea lirhity. the mind is at first depressed and then recovers itself more strongly, might very well have suggested Kant's idea of the spiritual reinvigoration occasioned by perceptions which in some way do violence^ to our sensuous fancy. For Kant, as for Burke, there is no acknowledged synthesis of the sublime with the beautiful, although the final conception of beauty as attained by Kant in the latter part of his discuscannot say, there-' sion would admit of such a synthesis. fore, that he makes the sublime a species of the beautiful. Both, rather, are species of the aesthetic judgment, but only
We
Gewaltthatig
fiir
d. Einbildungskraft,"
Kr.
d. U., p. 99.
276
beauty belongs to the judgment of taste, while the sublime is rooted in an emotion of the intelligence (Geistesgefiihl). The two modes of feeling share indeed the semi-rational character, subjective yet universal, which marks the aesthetic judgment as such, but they differ widely in the nature of their objectmatter and in their consequent relation to it. Beauty always has to do with form sublimity may depend on form or on " Unform," a useful idiom which may cover The object of sublime both formlessness and deformity.^ feeling (we may not in strictness speak of a sublime object) is always one that resists our power of judgment, and so far For from being harmonious, is rather incongruous with it. this reason the sublime is one degree more subjective than the beautiful, and in every way is more difficult, making higher demands upon the mind. Its essence is to throw us back on ourselves, to depend upon our acquired culture and ideas, of which it demands much more than the sense of beauty, to give an austere or negative pleasure akin to awe and admiration, to communicate a serious and stirring, not a playful and tranquil movement to the imagination, and as incapable of residing in any sensuous form to stimulate only the ideas of the reason and not those of the understanding. For the former, which can be represented in no sense-perception, are evoked in us by the very conflict or incongruousness which exhibits to us the inadequacy of sense. This special relation to reason was probably intended to be a radical difference between the sublime and the beautiful, but is obliterated as a distinction by the concluding account in the Dialectic which places the latter also in essential relation to ideas of reason or of the moral order. In spite of this inward and ideal character, however, Kant
;
the sublime, like the beautiful, to mere abstract not appeal in our perception of it to distinct conceptions drawn from our knowledge. must accept the feeling as it follows from what we directly see. must not think of the stars as suns with their systems, nor of the sea as the reservoir of the clouds or the highway of the nations. must judge them aesthetically only as a crowd of luminous points in an immeasurable vault, and as
tries to restrict
feeling.
We must
We
We
We
Kant
never, I think, uses "hasslich" of the object of sublime feeling.
He
does use " grasslich."
THE SUBLIME.
277
a shining surface or menacing abyss. To our minds to-day this dualism seems unreasonable. We cannot understand why feeling should be void of content, especially as the sublime exists in the reaction of our ideas, and is explicitly
characterised, in language that anticipates Ruskin, as dependent on relations. But the result is that this peculiar stimulation is chiefly to be looked for in unwrought ^ and inorganic Nature, a striking testimony to the widening of the aesthetic sense. It is also said to be suggested, strictly in accordance with the theory, by the extreme of formlessness in the Jewish prohibition, " Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven
image." Longinus, it will be remembered, had drawn an example from the books of Moses. In the instance adduced by Kant, an idea taken from a consciousness hostile to expression through sense, becomes, by a very curious meeting of extremes, the content of poetry at the point where it tends
to pass out of the sphere of art. Thus the extremes of consciousness below and above the region of beautiful expression, appear in this case to join hands. The idea which underlies Kant's theory is thus quite clear. It is closely analogous to his view of the moral law, which is in his mind throughout. The sublime in its two species mathematical, i.e. excited by objects which reveal the impotence of sense to satisfy the idea of totality, and dynamical, i.e. evoked by objects or occurrences which reveal our powerlessness as natural beings to overcome the forces of Nature, though our moral freedom is superior to their omnipotence, depends on the stimulation of our moral ideas, which nothing in sensuous nature can either represent or overcome, by a primary non-conformity between an external object and our power of judgment. I do not know whether any stray echoes of Kantian speculation penetrated to the poet Thomas Campbell (d. 1 844) but the mental reaction in which Kant finds the sublime is fairly represented by the closing stanzas of his lyric, " The Last Man." * Kant would, however, remind us that God and Immortality are postulates, not facts.
1
"Roh."' " Go, Sun, while Mercy holds me up On Nature's awful waste, To drink this last and bitter cup
Of grief that man
shall taste
278
It
is
a conception which bears noble testimony to the which sea ^ and mountain ^ were beginning to impart. But in its true place, as a theory of apparent ugliness in relation to beauty, it has a fatal defect of principle. This defect was signalised above as the absence of any synthesis of the sublime with the beautiful, and is rooted in the subjectivity ascribed by Kant to beauty, and the double subIn beauty the "form" has jectivity imputed to the sublime. a content which can be analysed, although its purposive import must not be definitely affirmed, but the essence of the
inspiration
sublime falls wholly within the mind, so that absolutely no conformity is assumed between stimulus and reaction, and therefore no attempt can possibly be made to attach expressive significance to the objects which by purely negative behaviour serve as such stimuli. And so the link of expressive or characteristic structure, which stands ready to guide us step by step from facile and orderly beauty to the more sombre and intricate aspects of life and nature, is absolutely cut asunder and we are never taught to look for the form of the beautiful in those very perceptions which startle us at first sight by superhuman force or magnitude. And therefore the ideas of reason thus negatively evoked can have only a bare moral victory, and are not recognised as prevailing, in an intricate orderliness and significance, throughout all the terror and immensity of the external world. With Turner and Ruskin before us, we do not comprehend the sesthetic perception to which, as to Kant, the stormy sea was simply horrible, and the elements of splendid beauty in the lines and masses which express its resistlessness made no positive appeal to the imagination. The sublime with all it implies could not be rightly valued until it came to be appreciated as an extension of beauty, indeed, but still an extension of beauty.
;
Go tell the Night that hides thy face, Thou saw'st the last of Adam's race On earth's sepulchral clod,
The darkening Universe defy
To quench
Or shake
1
his immortality,
his trust in God." references to De Saussure, combined with the restriction of the sublime proper to wild inorganic nature, prove, I think, that the Alps were largely in Kant's mind. His phrase, " rohe Natur," is erroneously referred to beauty and organic beings by von Hartmann, ^stheiik, i., 15. Kant often mentions the sea.
The
GENIUS.
279
But for a view which shut up both attributes within a subjective mental reaction, no positive meeting-point in the significant form of perceptions was open to them. Without
a concrete analysis no synthesis was possible. So much for the range of beauty, which, if we follow for the moment our general sense of the term as equivalent to " aesthetic quality," Kant has immensely amplified in accordance with modern feeling, by his theory of the sublime, ii. In dealing with the sensuous vehicles of ciassifleauonof ^^^beauty,^ as they constitute the different arts, Kant is very brief and unsystematic, though in many places he anticipates later contentions. The theory of a developing artconsciousness, and an appreciation of the antithesis between the 2 ancient and modern world are conspicuous by their absence,* a lacuna plainly connected with his dread of objective teleology. For the same reason, there are but few traces of a desire to regard the material media of the arts as forming an orderly system in which all necessary kinds of expression might find a place. In distinguishing fine art from science however, with the claims of the " period of genius " before his mind, he makes a striking suggestion, which Hegel adopts, and which in Kant leads up to important results. It is true, he says, that genius though not independent of training or reflection, is a gift rooted in nature, of which it shows the unconscious creative power, and is the peculiar organ of fine art, which may even be defined as the art of genius. This natural gift is not in the same sense needed for exact science, which is pursued purely through conscious intellectual operations. Anyone, (having enough intellect, we must suppose) could but he could not, by taking learn all that Newton taught Here we thought, even begin to learn how to make a poem. have at once an immense advance on Lessing and eighteenthcentury ideas,' though Kant is above the wildness of the
;
youthful Goethe and Schiller.

1 Kant drops out the sublime almost entirely from his theory of art. The product of art comes too near implying an objective conception to be connected with a feeling which, even more than beauty, demands absolute purity. For a combination of beauty and sublimity Kant once refers us to " rhymed tragedy," a strange proof how little he approached a synthesis. 2 The conclusion of Observations on the feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful shows how Kant stood on the old lines about the Renaissance and Gothic art. * Dr. Johnson took the opposite line. " Newton could have written a great epic if he had chosen,"
28o
Fine art, then, is closely akin to nature. The paradoxes of beauty explain how this must be. All beauty, and therefore All nature qua beautiful, has the form of purposiveness. is free from definable beauty, and therefore the beauty of art, purpose. Art, therefore, is beautiful, when, although known unconscious of rule or set purpose to be art, it apears as free as nature. is beautiful when it appears to possess Nature These ideas, thrown out in a few the purposiveness of art. sentences, have their consequences in the views of Schiller and Hartmann. Kant's actual classification of the fine arts,^ on which the author himself lays no great stress, rests on a fantastic deduction from the true principle, that laeauty whether of art or of
'E-x.^re.ssion par excellence is speech, and nature is expression. this as communicating at once thought, perception and feeling, has the three elements, word, gesture, and modulation or accent. On this analogy he divides the fine or expressive arts into arts of speech, of form, and of play of sensation. Judging from an earlier passage, in which he has said that the form of all objects of sense is either " shape " or " play," the distinction between simultaneity and succession would
seem
to
be also
in his
mind.
We find
in his table
two
crafts
which ought not to be
in-
of cluded among fine arts, plainly dominated by landscape gardening. The former is practical intent the latter does not deal with a true expressive material. The former he ranks with the arts of speech, the latter with those of form. I mentioned the origin of this unfortunate classification, because the distinction between speaking and formative art has been erected into a principle, and oratory being necessarily omitted, has led to the species of poetry being set out In an imaginary parallelism to the non-poetical arts, as by Schelling, the former being called the Ideal and the latter the Real series, and this notion of two parallel series, under these or other headings, has continued to operate in later German philosophy with the most unnatural results, grave difficulty being found, in particular, as to the place which music ought to
the art of oratory and the art
hold.
Kant's nearest approach to a linear classification

P. 73-
is
given in
kant's scheme of the arts.
281
his comparison of the aesthetic value of the fine arts. In this, poetry is assigned the first place, and some words of this estimate set the keynote for Schiller's doctrine of "semblance"
"Poetry plays with the semblance,^ without deceiving; for it declares its occupation to be mere play." Painting, it should be noted, has already been called the art of sensuous semblance, and plastic, including architecture and sculpture, that of sensuous truth. Of course for the complete doctrine of esthetic semblance, which Kant only offends against in expression and not for a moment in thought, the form of sculpture is a " Schein " as much as that of painting, only less adaptable and so less ideal. Painting therefore ranks above it. This gradation prepares us for the series of the arts according to ideality in Hegel. About the rank of music there is a curious variety of suggestions. For us they have the interest that a later theory of the original import of music as depending on its relation to the emotional modulations of the voice, is here suggested and accepted as a fact, but put aside as not bearing on aesthetic value, but on associations which are only of interest to private feeling. The aesthetic value of music is referred to the mathematical interrelation by which the complex of sounds is made into a whole attended with an abundance of thoughts too full for verbal expression. But these thoughts depend on purely mechanical associations and the essential content of music is therefore so bare, and the culture it implies so slight, that apart from its mere pleasantness, in which it ranks first of all arts, and its charm and emotional power (due to voice associations), in which it ranks second, it ought to be placed lowest of the whole list. This remark, like almost the entire content of Kant's aesthetic, reappears in a much modified form in Hegel. And the analysis of musical beauty as depending on the mathematical relations which bind its parts into a coherent whole recurs in conjunction with a less humble estimate of its aesthetic value, in the deepest modern appreciation of musical significance, that which regards it as representing the spirit or idealised form of occurrence or existence.^ In noting Kant's perplexities about music, we may remember that he made little use of the ancients who knew something of its true value, which we have seen to be greatly neglected through the middle age and in eighteenth
;
and "play."
"Schein," K.
d. U.,
201.
"Hanslick," in Lotze, G.
d. A.,
486
fif.
282
century criticism.
And we
should be grateful to Kant for
at least striving to recognise the greatest art of his time. Kant gives no account of the comic within the limits of fine
He inclines to regard the jest ^ as belonging rather to the arts of pleasure. Nevertheless his famous definition of laughter as an affection arising from an expectation suddenly brought to nothing,'* probably had to do with Hegel's definition of comedy. His direct connection of the mental shock thus experienced with the muscular convulsion of laughter has a materialistic sound, recalling Burke but modern psychology has much to say of the bond between mental and muscular tension, and the simplicity and abruptness of Kant's identification should count in his favour, if, as seems probable, it contains an important truth. When we hold our breath in expectation, and then undergo a violent change of tension through the expectation coming to nothing, we certainly go through a process like that which Kant describes. And although expectation and tension have many causes, it might be maintained that there is a peculiar suddenness ai>d completeness of contrast in the relaxation that accompanies amusement, which is well described by Kant's phrase " brought to nothing." In the case of serious disappointment for instance, the expectation changes to something
art.
; ,
positive though opposite.
Kant, we must insist, was a good observer. His shrewd and decisive criticisms of society, literature, and national character have an Aristotelian quality. A translation of wellchosen extracts from the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and still more from the earlier work in itself a mere notebook Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful, would throw quite a new light on the popular idea of the great metaphysician. The habit of taking up into his theory great numbers of everyday terms which he explains in passing by terse and pregnant definitions, is characteristic of Kant and Lessing, as of Aristotle. It was adopted by Schiller and Hegel, and has much to do with the grasp and
solidity of objective idealism.

Conclusion.
6.
If
we now
recall, for
the last time, in order
measure the difference between the starting - points of ancient and modern eesthetic, the three principles and antito
P. Z07.
8 lb.
THE THREE ANTITHESES,
28.^ O
theses by which we judged the theories of the Greeks, we shall find ourselves in a different world. i. The metaphysical criticism of fine art which treated it as an inferior species of common reality and therefore as subordinate to that reality in import and beneath it in utility, has yielded to a view which ranks it as the superior co-ordinate of natural products, both having beauty only as freely symbolic or expressive of supra-sensuous meaning. Imitation is replaced by symbolism, and even if art is held to be in one sense bound by external reality, it is understood that in as far as it deals with mere form or with imaginative ideas it has the advantage of nature and not vice versd. The metaphysical criticism is replaced by theories of the metaphysical import of beauty. ii. The moralistic criticism with its confusion between ccsthetic and practical interest, is almost wholly swept away. With the frank acceptance of what Plato treated as its inferiority, the restriction to imaginative form or semblance, now opposed alike to sensuous solicitation and to definitely conceived purpose, the beautiful is finally freed from the suspicion of sensuality and from the claims of moral proselytism. Only in Kant a trace of moralism remains in as far as the permanent value of the beautiful is referred by him exclusively to its representation of moral ideas and the moral order, in consequence of the subjectivism which hinders him from plainly asserting the existence of any more general system which might express itself not only through morality in the world of conduct, but otherwise in other spheres. In pointing however to a supra-sensuous unity common to the world of nature and of freedom, he really transcends this false subordination and we might say that beauty is for him a symbol of morality only because and in as far as he understands morality to symbolise the order of the universe. iii. The formal principle of unity and variety, which stood in the way of a concrete analysis of beauty, is being transformed into the principle of expressiveness, characterisation, In Kant's discussion of colours and tones we significance. positive or concrete saw the meeting-point of the two. is as yet, indeed, only in the structure of aesthetic science making. The outlines are firmly traced and the materials are lying about in heaps, but the building is hardly begun. The idea of beauty is still, if I may use the expression, a con;
284
Crete conceived in the abstract, a meeting point of polar extremes not yet exhibited in the kinds and phases determined by their varying relations. Thus we may henceforward confine ourselves to the aesthetic problem proper, and its import, if any, for general philo-
sophy. distinct and reflective aesthetic consciousness has been created both for philosophy and for art. It is only since Goethe, it has been truly said, that the artist has been conscious of his " mission." Whether, as Kant seems to assume,^ this consciousness is a fortunate condition for creative genius, must be very seriously doubted. But for philosophy reflecting upon beauty it is indispensable. The aesthetic problem ^ as inherited by Kant consisted in the question "How can a pleasurable feeling partake of the character of reason ? " To this we have seen his answer in Its expansion we the four paradoxes and their corollaries. shall have to trace in later thought. The problem of general philosophy which gave urgency to the aesthetic issue consisted in the question, " How can the sensuous and the ideal world be reconciled " The answer to this we have seen in the relation between the three portions of Kant's critical problem. The order of nature and the moral order must, he contends, have a common root, which is manifested most strikingly in the spontaneous harmony of natural necessity and ideal purpose exhibited to the perceptive and creative sense of beauty. The unconsciousness and freedom which fine art shares with nature indicates that this purposiveness is really immanent in material things, and is not forced from without upon the sensuous or natural elements. If so, they too are inherently rational, and the compatibility, nay more, the ultimate unity of the natural and moral order is estab.-"
lished.
Kant, as we know, wrote the reservation " subjective " over the entire outcome of his aesthetic and teleological researches. Even when he anticipated later theory by a suggestion for a Universal History which should establish a purpose of nature in the life of the human race, evolving moral civilisation through the conflicts of pain and desire, and when he combated, on this ground, the difficulty that earlier generations are sacrificed
^
Observations, etc., " Conclusion."
See ch.
viii.
end.
THE FUTURE OF KANt's

to
IDEAS.
285
an end they will never know,^ all this is to him simply a point of view, a way in which the aggregate of facts may be reduced to a system. It is clear that either the idea or the reservation is untenWhat experience compels us to assume, is objective for able. What is not essential to explain our experience, we have us. no right to dwell upon in serious thought. It was rather the nature of objectivity than the reality of the immanent idea that was called in question by Kant's reservation. new spirit would be brought to the consideration of this issue, when the concrete idea, as Kant had obtained it by the resolution of the inherited antithesis of nature and freedom, should be accepted as the nature of the real, and further enriched by the same antithesis in its historical form as between the ancient and the modern mind. For the immanent reason would then reveal itself to be not merely a statical but a dynamical unity, not merely an equilibrium but an evolution.
written in 1784, but
" Build a house they will never live in." This essay, Werke, vol. 7, was its views are practically reaffirmed in the Critique of
Judgment.
CHAPTER
GOETHE.
Tie PoBition of
schiuer.
I-
XI.
SCHILLER AND
THE FIRST STEPS OF A CONCRETE SYNTHESIS

"
The
sy](.s
above may be taken as the leading reQf fije Kantian critical philosophy, so far as
It forms the point of departure they interest us in sesthetic. Yet such a for the true comprehension of the beauty of art. comprehension could only be realised by an overcoming of the Kantian defects through a higher appreciation of the true unity of necessity and freedom, of particular and universal, of sensuous and rational. "And so it must be admitted that the art-sense of a profound mind which was philosophic as well as artistic demanded and proclaimed the principle of totality and reconciliation before the time at which it was recognised by techIn so doing it opposed itself to (Kant's) nical philosophy. abstract infinity of thought, his duty for duty's sake, and his understanding which takes account of nature and formless reality, sense and feeling, only as a limit, as something ab-
'
'
solutely hostile, and therefore antagonistic to itself. It is Schiller then to whom we must give credit for the great service of having broken through the Kantian subjectivity and abstraction of thought, and ventured upon going quite beyond it by intellectually apprehending the unity and reconciliation as the truth, and by making them real through the power of art. Now this unity of the universal and particular, of freedom and necessity, of the spiritual and the natural, which Schiller scientifically apprehended as principle and essence of art, and unweariedly strove to call to life by art and aesthetic culture, was in the next place erected into the principle of knowledge and existence as itself the Idea, the Idea being recognised as the sole truth and reality. It was by this recognition that science attained in Schelling its absolute stand.
. .
pomt.
^ " 1
Hegel, /Esth.,
i.
78, 80.
(E. Tr. p. 116.)
OBJECTIVITY IN SCHILLER.
287
It is thus that Hegel in his maturer years recalls the history of the time, when, as we shall see in the following chapter, his youthful friendship with Schelling was still unbroken, and when the two friends, in close correspondence, were forming their views under the twofold influence of Kant and Fichte on the one hand, and of Schiller and Goethe on the other.
It is
strange that historians of aesthetic take no notice of
this
remarkable testimony. Hegel was not the man lightly to give credit to an amateur thinker at the expense of philosophy proper, I shall therefore attempt simply to illustrate his statement in dealing with Schiller's conceptions, which definitely initiated the fusion of Kant's abstract synthesis with
the historical data of sesthetic. Schiller was on one side of his mind a Kantian, while on the other he was both a classicist by study and sympathy, and a romanticist by his period and his genius. Thus he formed a link between Kant and Goethe. For Goethe shared these factors of Schiller's mind in inverse proportion. Though as a rule barely tolerant of metaphysic, he was not untouched by Kant, while the marriage of Faust and Helena is a symbol of his lifelong devotion to the reconciliation of Hellenism with what is best in the romantic spirit. Hegel, with obvious justice, connects the deeper interpretation of the beautiful, which now began, with the growth of romantic feeling in art.^ Thus the relations between Schiller and Goethe were preeminently favourable to the investiture of Kantian abstractions
with living
reality.
ascribed to Schiller is in its essence, i, the abandonment of the reservation by which at every turn Kant ascribes subjectivity, in a sense excluding objectivity, to the unity of opposites which he found in the Schiller's account of sesthetic semblance sesthetic judgment. and the play impulse may be treated imder this head, as the positive form under which he envisages the objective nature
The achievement which Hegel
of beauty.
to this we must add, 2, as a corollary the first recogbased on definite conceptions, of a difference between whether to be called principles modern principles of art of beauty or by some other name and those which had The link becurrently been assigned to the art of antiquity.
nition,
And
^sth.,
i.
27-8.
(E. Tr. p. 39.)
288
tween the objectivity of the beautiful and the latitude of the perception or principle which constitutes it, depends upon the dynamical nature of an objective principle, demanding as it does a relevancy to the movements and phases of the human
mind, instead of acquiescence in the first indolent impressions of feeling. Indications of the actual range of Schiller's aesthetic sympathies may fairly be treated in this connection. I. At the close of chap. ix. I alluded to the eventObjectivity of Beauty, fyi decade which followed the publication of the The first of its characteristics Kritik d. Urtheilskraft. which comes before us is that it contains nearly the whole From 1 792 till of Schiller's work in theoretical aesthetic. after 1800 there appeared almost yearly, for the most part in publications such as Thalia and the Horen^ papers or short treatises by Schiller dealing with aesthetic problems. From 1795 onwards, it must be remembered, Goethe and Schiller were in active correspondence, so that in the writings of either the ideas of the other were to some extent repreIn sented. Their "period of genius" lay behind them. Schiller was in his thirty-sixth and Goethe in his forty1795 Werther and Gotz v. Berlichingen were things sixth year. The R'duber was written at least fourof twenty years ago. The romantic movement which their teen years before. stormy youth had inaugurated was now developing in other hands. The Schlegels, for example, began their activity in this decade, an activity which furnished to profounder thinkers and critics of greater real genius than themselves, a splendid wealth of material and a constant reminder of the historical antithesis between the classical and the romantic. It should be added that Voss's Homer (the Iliad new, the Odyssey revised) appeared in 1790, and F. A. Wolf's Prolegomena in This was the epoch in which Schiller, the descendant 1 795. of Lessing * and Winckelmann no less than of Kant, was brought face to face with the question whether or no the artimpulse and the sense of beauty rested on a true immanent
^ In which Goethe and Schiller co-operated in 1795-6. Schiller's Letters on The /Esthetic Education of Humanity and his paper on "Naive and Senti-
mental Poetry " appeared in

^
it.
the titles of Lessing's Erziehung d. Menschengeschlechts, Schiller's Britfe iiber d. /Esthetische Erz. d. Menschheit.
Compare
and
UNITY OF SENSE AND REASON.

principle
to
it
289
and tendency in the universe, not merely imputed by arbitrary reflection. For Schiller's general position the letters on the Esthetic Education of Humanity give the most complete results. Going at once to the heart of his ideas, in his relation to
spirit
we find that he believes himself in accord with the but not with the letter of the Kantian system. It is natural, he says, for a philosopher, as intellectuaJ, to seem to treat feeling as a mere hindrance to reason, and this is what in the letter Kant appears to do. But in the spirit or inevitable interpretation of his system this is not so, for the sensuous impulse must be taken as co-ordinate with, and not subordinate to, the rational impulse. The idea of reciprocity, drawn from a new work of Fichte,^ is applied in this account of co-ordinaKant,
tion,
which
is
also described as reciprocal subordination.*
In
and reason are capable of appearing in harmony only because it is their ultimate nature to be in harmony. The subjective conception is dropped as untenable in face of
short, sense
a complete estimate of man. " In the one-sided moral estimate the reason is satisfied when its law has absolute supremacy in the complete anthropological estimate, in which content counts as well as form, and feeling has a voice, the distinction [between the suppression and the completion of individuality] is of all the more importance. Reason demands unity, nature variety, and both systems of legislation lay their claims on man."* The " ideal man " * is represented by the State, but is not realised in his fulness by any state which remaining in abThe alternative and better straction kills out individuality. way is that the ideal principle of the state should enter into and ennoble the individual till he becomes capable of participating in a spiritual unity without sacrificing the natural Even the artist must seem to variety which is his element. respect his material the statesman must do so in reality. The point of all this lies in the conception that the " parts," whether conceived as the particulars of nature or of feeling,
; ;
or as unsocialised individual
human
1
beings,
are really
in
* Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, able works that influenced this critical time. 2 Briefe it. Aesth. Erziehung, No. 13, note, s
794, another of the remark-
lb..
No. 4Again an idea drawn from Fichte, Letter
4, note.
290
Here we have themselves capable of unity and organization. that nothing can be implied the central principle of idealism, made into what it is not capable of being. Therefore when certain syntheses and developments are actual it is idle to deny that they are objective or immanent in the nature of the parts developed. The central proof and example of these principles, as well as the most effective influence in raising mankind from the first nature of savagery to the second of civilization, Schiller believes to exist in fine art, which he identifies with general refinement of life and manners in a way that is capable of, but single quotation will put his view requires, justification. completely before us. " Beauty is therefore indeed an object for us, because reflection is the condition under which we have a feeling of it but at the same time it is a state of our subject, because feeling is the It is condition under which we can have a perception of it. therefore a form, because we contemplate it it is life, because we feel it. In one word, it is at once our state and our act. " And just because it is both of these at once, it serves as a triumphant proof that receptivity by no means excludes infinity, that form, nor limitation, activity, nor matter, therefore the necessary physical dependence of man in no way It proves this, and, I must add, destroys his moral freedom. nothing else can prove it. For as in the enjoyment of truth or of logical consistency feeling is not necessarily one with thought, but follows accidentally upon it, such feeling can only prove that a sensuous nature may be sequent upon a rational one, and conversely not that both can exist together, not that they can act reciprocally upon each other, not that their union is absolute and necessary. Just the opposite inThe exclusion of feeling ference would be more natural. while we think, and of thought while we feel, would lead us to infer the incompatibility of these two natures, as in fact the analytic reasoners can adduce no better evidence that pure reason is realisable in humanity than that it is imperative for But as in the enjoyment of beauty or of aesthetic it to be so. unity there takes place an actual union and interpenetration of matter with form and of receptivity with activity, this very fact demonstrates the compatibility of the two natures, the realisableness of the infinite in the finite, and therefore the possibility of the most sublime humanity.
BEAUTY OBJECTIVE.
29I
in perplexity to find to moral freedom, seeing that in beauty a case is given wherein the latter is able perfectly to co-exist with the former, and man is not obliged to escape from matter in order to assert himself as spirit. if man is free without ceasing to be sensuous,^ as the fact
We ought,
therefore,
no longer to be
a passage from sensuous dependence
Now
of beauty teaches, and if freedom is something absolute and supra-sensuous as its idea necessarily involves, then it can no longer be a question how he succeeds in ascending from the limits [of sense ?] to the absolute, or in opposing himself to sensuousness in his thought and will, as in beauty this In one word, the question can no ;is already accomplished. from beauty to truth, seeing that the longer be how he passes latter as a capacity''' is already contained in the former, but only how he pioneers his path from common to aesthetic ' reality, from mere feelings of life to feelings of beauty." Little need be added to this passage after our prolonged see at once that objectivity is the discussion of Kant. whole root of the import thus ascribed to beauty but further .that it must be such an objectivity as is compatible with existence in mind, in perception, in feeling, and in utterance. Only it is worth while to observe the extreme logical clearness, not usually characteristic of him, with which Schiller apprehends the nature of synthesis. * The factors which are to be united in the beautiful cannot, he says, be genuinely com-bined unless they are first unmistakeably distinguished, and then so united that each wholly disappears in the product of Unless they disappear in the product, they cantheir union. not be truly united for as they appear in severance they are
We
opposed to each other. The term which indicates this disappearance* in a higher import is occasionally used by Goethe
1 Schiller to Goethe, Br. W., 3, 262. "Poetry and art have two conditions they must rise above the actual, and remain within the sensuous." * Cf. Letter 21, the passage which excited Mr. Ruskin's indignation by free rational or -affirming that beauty only changes man's whole nature to a second nature, but " discovers no sigk truth, helps us to fulfil no sin^Îe Mr. Ruskin cannot have had the context duty." Cf. Mod. Painters, 2, 134.
before him. 3 Letter 25. * Letter 18. , , Schiller goes too far perhaps 5 " Aufgehoben "= preserved by destruction. " no trace of the division must remain in the whole product." -in saying that But it is much easier to understate than to overstate the change effected in .parts by incorporation in a new whole.
292
in a similar sense but the peculiar logical context of this passage suggests that its use as a technical term of Hegelian dialectic may be due to the " Esthetic letters." Beauty, then, though subjective, as Kant said, is also In what positive character, we objective, as he meant. naturally ask, does it manifest itself within human perception and activity? Schiller's answer to this is furnished in the kindred ideas of aesthetic semblance and of the play-impulse. Preserving the fundamental Kantian features of pleasure in mere form, and of contrast with practical purpose, respectively, Schiller attempts to draw from them important consequences
;
relative to the growth of civilization. Much that is true and striking is brought forward by him with reference especially
to the rigid practicality of primitive life, and the advance implied in such enjoyment as that of seeing for seeing's sake, which is coincident with the awakening of the play-impulse, the impulse to a purely ideal activity.^ a. The doctrine of aesthetic semblance (asthetischer Schein) is developed by Schiller out of SMnw^'ce.
Kant's account of aesthetic form, which, in speaking of poetry, he also described as a semblance (Schein) that is not deceptive. Schiller presses home this idea with considerable acuteness and with the full powers of his rhetoric, and has thus made the Kantian distinction between beauty knowledge and practice a common-place of literature, although it can hardly be said that he derives from it any substantive truth which was not included in Kant's four paradoxes. .Esthetic semblance, he insists, is Honest, that is to say, makes no pretence at being more than semblance and is Independent, that is to say, is not such as to be capable of enhancement of the pleasure which it gives, through the real existence of the object simulated. Real objects may indeed be aesthetically contemplated, but only in as far as we dis;
tinguish their semblance from their existence. And this is a harder task than to appreciate the work of art in which this separation is performed ready to our hand.
Thus
\>
aesthetic
ception,
semblance is distinguished at once from dewhether sensuous or logical, and from the appetitive
^ Letter 26. " As soon as man begins to receive pleasure through the eye [mit dem Auge zu geniessen], and seeing obtains an independent value for him, he has become sesthetically free, and the play-impulse is awakened."
WHAT
or practical relation to
IS
REALITY
293
reality
and by emphasising from an
anthropological standpoint the gradual growth of an interest in the semblance, and the fact that all difficulties, apparently connected with representative beauty, really arise not from the unreality of the semblance, but from insufficient attention to its " honesty," its confessed unreality he paves the way for a truer conception than Kant possessed of the relative value of natural and artistic beauty, and for a definite justification of His paradox the place held by the beautiful in civilised life. that man is civilised only in proportion as he has learnt to value the semblance above the (common-place practical) reality is a tremendous reversal of the position taken up by Plato, and was influential in the later course of post- Kantian
speculation.
There is a difficulty in the psychical distinction which this How can one doctrine of semblance may be held to involve. kind of sense-perception be set down as semblance, and anshould visual or auditory sensations be other as reality ? taken to belong to form, while those of taste, smell and touch are set down as giving sheer reality ? Surely the one group are as "objective" or "subjective" as the other! Schiller, though successful in the development of doctrines, is not helpful in exactly tracing their roots, and here he falls decidedly saw that in Kant's account of the pleasure behind Kant. of simple sensations he at. least faces this ultimate difficulty He treats aesthetic character as depenwith perfect candour. dent on the presence of " form " in contrast with mere sensory And " form," which is for him the essence of stimulation. aesthetic semblance, is a property or nature in sensation disIn tinguishable from its mere existence as sense-stimulation. ranking sensations according to aesthetic quality he therefore
Why
We
follows a principle which is at least intelligible, and probably contains the true basis of the distinction between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic elements in sense. Schiller replaces this " Reality," he says, ^' is principle by a more popular phrase. He the work of things semblance is the work of man." import of any may mean by this semblance the structural but clearly as it stands the antithesis tells us perception nothing, for every sensation is a reaction of our organism. His rhetoric expresses in striking phrases what we commonly " In the eye and assume, but does not help us to justify it, back from the sense, ear aggressive matter is already hurled
;
294
is
and the object

senses
is
set at
a distance from
us,
while in the animat
we are directly in contact with it." ^ Here no attempt made to point out in what characteristic of sensations the
by
" form " resides, and what constitutes their " reality," The distinction between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic senses,
which was accepted as a sumed by Schiller.

^puis!^~
fact
Plato's time, is simply as-
b. The idea of the play-impulse is also obtained through a rhetorical development of suggestions made by Kant. It springs from his constant use
of the term "play," to indicate the free action of the

in
faculties,
constitutes aesthetic judgment, and consequently to denote any mode of succession in time in which such sensations as those of music or colour present the charrtr
harmony which
of
art.
simplest form, according to the account elaborated by which strikingly anticipates the ideas of Mr. Herbert Spencer,^ the play-impulse is the mere discharge of accumu" The animal plays lated energy which demands a vent. when the superfluity of life pricks itself into activity." . . In a higher phase it may be said to arise when man awakes to the pleasure of seeing for its own sake.* When he has thus noted the "form" or "semblance," it is only one step further to confer independence on it by imitation. No doubt the anthropological sequence is wrong at this point imitation is much older than conscious enjoyment of form but it is plain that the connection which Schiller insists on is real, and the only difficulty is the eternally recurrent one of distinguishing degrees of consciousness in a developing activity. At every point the play-impulse and the imitative or dramatic tendency the tendency to enjoy simulation or semblance are closely connected, and it seems true that in all games and amusements there is involved a certain mimicry of life.* Schiller's further account of the growth of art and the feeling for beauty, as the play-impulse gradually filling up its empty sense of freedom with a content of expression, is full of
its
In
Schiller,
Br., 26. Br., 27. Cf. H. Spencer, Psychology, ii. 627. Was Schiller the " author " there mentioned ? 8 Br., 26. * Br., 15. Cf. Prof. Brown, The Fine Arts, Pt. I.
German
THE PLAY-IMPULSE.
295
suggestions which later theory has realised, more particularly

as to the aspect which seems most alien to the play-idea pure and simple the nature of the beautifying instinct as applied to objects of use or necessity. " What^ he (man just passing from sensuous to aesthetic 'play') possesses, what he produces, must no longer bear merely the traces of utility, the over-careful impress of a purpose;* besides the service, for
which it exists, it must also reflect the ingenious understanding which contrived it, the loving hand which executed it, the free and cheerful mind which chose and set it up to look at. Even his weapons are no longer to be objects of terror only, but they are to give pleasure also, and the cunningly wrought sword belt claims no less attention than the mortal edge of the sword." Finally the history of the play-impulse develops into an analysis of the social character of art, resting ultimately upon ideas thrown out by Kant in connection with social interest in beauty,* and the essential communlcability of aesthetic
.
.
feeling.
"
We cannot universalise either our sensuous or
our
intellectual pleasures, for the former are essentially individual, the latter neglect the deep-seated bases of personality. In
beauty alone we are at once the individual and the race it can make the whole world happy, and every being forgets its limitations while under the spell of the beautiful. The defect of a play-theory of the beautiful is its tendency " Ernst ist das to cut life in two between work and play. Leben, heiter ist die Kunst " is a jarring sentiment, unless we
;
so largely that the natural associations of the words Towards such a theory Schiller seems at times to be drifting ' under stress of the metaphor which he adopts. The two real links between beauty and the play-impulse are
interpret
it
are gone.
* It is
Br., 27. easy to see
how
in every phrase Schiller's rhetoric rests
upon Kant's
Mr. W. G. Collingwood's Philosophy of Ornament for a sketch and appreciative account of the reindeer dagger-haft of the Dordogne. * Krit d. U., sect. 41, where most of Schiller's account of progressive refinement is anticipated.
6
logic. * See
JSr., 27,
Cp.
" Deine Zauber binden wieder Was die Mode streng getheilt."
From
Schiller's
Hymn
to
Gladness.
E.g. Br., IS,
end.
296
their
common freedom from practical ends, and their common tendency to simulation or, in the very largest sense, the ideal treatment of reality. In other respects "play" suggests to us amusement and the relaxation of our faculties, and seerns not to do justice to the serious need of self-utterance, nor to the element of expressiveness involved in all work in which the craftsman has any degree of freedom. The play-impulse
is
in short only aesthetic

is
where
its
primarily negative free-
charged with a content which demands imaginative expression and any impulse which takes such a form is aesthetic, whether or no it chances to remind us of " play." Thus " the Kantian Schiller,"^ by his enthusiasm no less than by his genius, has not only affirmed the objectivity of the beautiful, but has vindicated its place and value in the evolution of civilised man. By so doing he followed and also stimulated the growing tendency to understand by objectivity and truth something more than mere fact and correctness, and to find the truest reality in that which has a meaning and a causal influence within the sphere of human
;
dom
life,
beautiful as a real f man's being, uniting the extremes "'^m2dli?n.^*^^P'".^^^'" of his mind, and continuous from the first dawn of civilisation, Schiller could hardly avoid directing his attention to the contrast of the antique and the modern which seemed to contradict this continuity. Such a contrast, we saw in chapter 9, was the historical or actual shape in which the inherent dualism of man's nature forced itself on the attention of an age which had become aware of the past. From the time of Dante downward, some kind of answer had been demanded to the question, whether the life of antiquity rested on the same principles as that of the modern world, or on better, or on worse. As knowledge was gathered and free intelligence awoke, the consciousness of this antagonism became more profound, and the efforts to resolve it more adequate. In the chapter referred to, I attempted to give some picture of the process by which the common humanity of the ancient world revealed itself to the modern, more
opposiuonof
2.
Having recognised the
especially through literature to Lessing and through plastic art to Winckelmann. I endeavoured to show that each of
^
Hartmann, ^sth.,
i.
24.
ANTIQUE AND MODERN.
297
these great interpreters, though in some degree taken captive by the objects of his study, and inclined to ascribe finality to their temporary conditions, nevertheless found within these limits enough significance and variety to suggest the relativity of the beautiful to human nature, and the interpretation of its oneness in accordance with that relativity. The work of scholarship and archaeology was tending, as we saw, in the same direction. But yet on the whole, before Lessing's death, the reaction of the later Renaissance was hardly spent. The pseudo- Hellenic tradition, though widened and humanised into a genuine Hellenic enthusiasm, still imposed upon the age. " Gothic " art was not understood. Lessing's Aristotelian defence of Shakespeare operated to reinforce as well as to deepen the principles of classical taste. It was not till the age of genius against which Lessing so hotly protested, that the full meaning of modern art came home to the German mind. Goethe, as Bernays says, *' liberated the century." Besides the definite influences which have been mentioned, the French revolution was filling the air with electricity. "Freedom" was a word with a meaning in 1795, and the work of Kant, Schiller, and their successors, in bringing down freedom from a metaphysical heaven to terrestrial life, had an import for their contemporaries which we are apt to
-
forget.
Did the principles of beauty as hitherto understood, according to the tradition of the Renaissance gradually widening did these principles fairly into a true Hellenic sympathy judgments and productions of that tumulcover the aesthetic tuous age ? It is interesting to note in the words of Goethe how this antagonism took form in the intercourse between
Schiller "
and
himself.^
it
How
curious
was
[Schiller's relation to
Kant] appeared
connection with Schiller became animated. fully conversation dealt entirely with our work or with Our he preached the gospel of theory, usually both together freedom, I defended the rights of nature from curtailment. Out of goodwill to me, perhaps, rather than from conviction, he refrained from treating the good mother (Nature) in the Esthetic letters with the unkind expressions which made the
;
when my
" Einwirkung
d.
neueren Philosophic" Werke, xxx. 341.
298
paper
'
Wiirde ^ so odious to me. But as I on my side obstinately and perversely extolled the advantages of the Greek mode of poetry, and of that founded upon it or derived from it, and not only so, but asserted that manner to be the exclusively right and desirable one, he was forced to more precise reflection, and it was to this very dispute that we owe the treatise, Ueber naive u. sentimentale Dichtung? The two modes of poetry, he concluded, were to be co-ordinate and acknowledge each other's claims. " By this he laid the first foundation of the whole new development of Êsthetic for Hellenic and Romantic,' and any other synonyms that may have been invented, are all derivable from that discussion, in which the original question had concerned the predominance of real, or of ideal
Anmuth
u.
'
'
'
'
treatment."
Kant in his "Observations" briefly describes the "Naive"* as "the noble and beautiful simplicity which bears the imThis rather than the fuller press of Nature, and not of Art." account in the Critique of the Power ofJudgment, was adopted by Schiller as the point of departure for his distinction. In both cases, however, Kant is referring primarily to social Schiller on the contrary, applying the idea intercourse. within the limits of Art, is obliged in some degree to modify The root of his antithesis is expressed its relation to Nature. when he says that the poet either is Nature or seeks Nature ; the former is the Naive and the latter the Sentimental poet.* But the sense in which a poet can be Nature is doubtful, and For if the the poles of the contrast tend to approximate. Naive means an intentional and conscious self-identification with Nature and in Art it must tend to that meaning it at once becomes difficult to distinguish from sentimentality, and the two are at least co-ordinate if not identical. This is certainly true of the sense of the Naive which Schiller traces in the decadence of art and among the most artificial nations, Such a sense is a species of the sentimental, e.g. the French. and so far we are off the track of the distinction between ancient and modern. But in spite of this difficulty Schiller succeeds by a really brilliant critical enquiry in establishing a difference, within the region of art, between Nature at first hand and Nature at
1793
(?)
1795-6-
lV.,iv.42o.
ff^, xii.
231.
SCHILLER ON SHAKESPEARE.
299
second hand.
little
There was, he points out, among the Greeks, sentimental interest in external Nature the purest case of the natural. Their unity with the world did not admit of Even in dealing with man they show an analoreflection. gous freshness and directness. Schiller's comparison^ of the meeting between Glaucus and Diomede in the Iliad with that between Ferrau and Rinaldo in Ariosto, is as felicitous as any example in Lessing or in Matthew Arnold. The principle of the implied antithesis is obvious, and forms the basis of shall have to all later dealing with the history of art. of Schelling and Hegel, and need dwell upon it in treating not therefore discuss it here. That however there are modern "naive" poets Schiller himself points out, having Goethe among others in his mind ; and he adds that they are exceedingly inconvenient to criticism, by confounding all its distinctions. They do in fact point to a higher unity, of which Schiller gives no sufficient account, beyond the schism of merely romantic art. But his primary idea could not be better illustrated than by his confession of his own early difficulties in appreciating Shakespeare. " When^ at a very early age I first became acquainted with,
We
him, I was indignant at his coldness, his insensibility, which permitted him to jest in the moments of highest emotion, to let the clown break in upon the most heart-rending scenes Misled by my acLear, Macbeth. in Hamlet, with recent poetry so as in every work to look quaintance reflect first for the poet, to meet him heart to heart, and to upon his object, in short to look at the object only with him as it is reflected in the subject, I found it intolerable that here the poet never showed himself and would never let me I was not yet capable of understanding . question him. Nature at first hand. I could only endure the picture of it the as reflected through the understanding, and to that end from 1750-17 80 French sentimental poets and the Germans were the right people for me." Here we trace the connection treatment, of Naive and Realistic, Sentimental and Idealistic treatise, and which which is emphasised elsewhere in the Goethe, as we saw, considered to have been its startingmay add, to show that the principles affecting point. mind, poetry and other art were closely connected in Schiller's
. . . . .
We
1
W.,
xii.
226.
lb., 22ft.
Schasler,
i.
635.
300
that in a criticism on an exhibition of pictures upon set subjects which Goethe had initiated he writes as to "The tearful Hector other German attribute, of sentimentality," " and a melting Andromache were to be feared, and they are not absent." ^ The ancients, he concludes, were great by limitation, the moderns by infinity, a distinction verbally reproduced by Schelling and possessing the same importance for later philosophy as the contrast of "naive" and "sentimental" itself, which it simply reiterates in a genercJized technical form. The advance made by Schiller consisted in placing the antique and modern principles on an equality, as stages in a natural evolution. His predecessors had not fairly and fully admitted the difference between them, but even when they recognised the greatness of the moderns, had endeavoured It was Schiller to force them into the mould of the ancients. who inaugurated the idea that it is not necessary to reduce differences to a vanishing point in order to assert continuity
of principle.
3- The treatise on naive and sentimental poetry gQQn produced its effect. In 1797 there appeared Fr. v. Schlegel's Essays on the Study of Greek Poetry,^ with a preface, which, referring to Schiller's treatise, declared that the principles of objective beauty could not be held to apply to modern poetic art. For, in defiance of the maxim that beauty must give a disinterested pleasure, the poet now relies on sub-
soMegei on senmer.
jective fascination, poetic "effect," and an interest in the existence of the ideal; these are his essentially "sentimental" characters. It will at once be seen that Kant's abstraction from positive content, by which he set down a relation to the ideal as impurity in aesthetic judgment, here recoils on the theory of the beautiful with destructive effect. Schlegel further points out that the sentimental mood becomes poetry only through the characteristic, that is, through the representation of what is individual. Otherwise, I presume he
can have no plastic or structural form adequate of individual emotion which is its material. Thus Greek Tragedy, he thinks, might claim the title of objective, as conforming to the accepted canons of a beautiful whole ; while Shakespearian tragedy, " which organises
it
must mean,
to the depth
IV., xii.
388.
W.,
5.
SCHLEGEL ON UGLINESS.
30I
out of sentimental and characteristic elements a self-complete and perfectly self-dependent interesting whole," should go by the name of " interesting tragedy." This name is therefore intended by Schlegel to take the art to which it applies out of the category of beauty as determined by Kant and by the lovers of antiquity. Whether such an exclusion was substantially justified by Kant's theory is another question. It is not certain that Shakespearian tragedy implies even an interest in the reality of an ideal in the sense which Kant considered extra-sesthetic. It may be doubtful whether Schlegel clearly appreciated the distinction between pleasure in aesthetic semblance and pleasure in the reality of objects or ideals, the latter of which alone is to be considered an unaesthetic interest. Rightly or wrongly, however, Schlegel, in handling this distinction borrowed from Schiller, ranks Shakespeare, not like Schiller, with the ancients, but as the very centre and standard-bearer of the moderns. It seems plain, as hinted above, that both critics are right. Shakespeare points to a modern art which shall transcend romantic dualism and again be classical. In this same volume, for the first time in the history of aesthetic, mention is made of the " Theory of Ugliness."^ Beauty is defined as "the pleasant manifestation of the good" ugliness as "the unpleasant manifestation of the bad." must suppose that an unpleasant manifestation of the good and a pleasant manifestation of the bad are taken to be impossible. The attempt is thus made to regard ugliness as wholly outside beauty and corresponding to it as its embodied But Schlegel soon finds that the positive embodinegation. ment of a negation is a troublesome conception to handle,^ and that in as far as it is positive the intensest ugliness will need the very greatest powers to represent it, and will always contain elements of the beautiful. The distinction which might meet this obvious difficulty does not seem to occur to him. The positive negation will be, so we should say, in some degree a confusion a parody or perversion of the type of beauty to which it is correlative, 4- The very inconsistency however of Schlescbiueron scMegeL gel's suggestions makes them an indication of a rapid revolution, both in taste and in theory. remarkable
;
We
JV., 5, p.
147.
P. 151.
.302
Jetter
this
from Schiller to Goethe' shows the effect, probably of very work of Schlegel, on the further history of the problem. Schiller will not put up with the dualism which (exaggerating his own antithesis) modern writers are labouring to introduce but yet he is so far impressed by their contention that he is inclined to abandon the term beauty altogether, and choose another word of less narrow associations. I quote the entire passage. " I fancy that this would be the right moment to pass in review the works of Greek art, in the light of the idea of the characteristic for Winckelmann's and Lessing's conception is still generally prevalent, and our most recent writers on aesthetic, dealing with poetry as well as with sculpture, take endless pains to liberate Greek beauty from all traces of the characteristic, and to make this latter the distinctive mark of
; ;
modern art. I think the recent aesthetic writers, in their struggles to separate the idea of beauty and present it in a certain purity, have pretty nearly hollowed it out, and turned it into an empty sound. The opposition between the beautiful and the correct or true [' Trefifende '] has been pushed much too far, and a demarcation which only the philosopher is in the habit of making (and which is only justifiable in one aspect), has been accepted far too coarsely. " Many, again, make another kind of mistake, in referring the idea of beauty far too much to the content of the work of art instead of to the treatment of it and then of course they must be puzzled when they have to comprehend under the same idea of beauty the Apollo of the Vatican and other figures like it, of which the content is enough to make them beautiful, with the Laocoon, or a Faun, or other painful or ignoble representations. " As you know, the same is the case with poetry. people have toiled and are still toiling to justify the crude and frequently low and ugly realism [' Natur,' the natural facts, whether of man's behaviour, or of other kinds] of Homer and the tragedians, in consonance with the idea they have formed of Greek beauty. I wish some one would at last venture to dismiss from circulation this idea and the word beauty itself, to which all those false notions are, in fact, inseparably
;
How
Br.-wechsel, 3. 158.
July, 1797.
SCHILLER'S FEELING FOR BEAUTY.
3O3
attached, and, as is reasonable, to set up in its place truth in the completest sense of the word." Truth, of course, is not here to be taken in an intellectual sense. The " Kantian " Schiller knows better than that. What the passage means is, first, that he is quite sure that the pseudo-classical idea of beauty cannot be stretched so as to cover romantic art ; and secondly, looking back upon Greek art in the light of rom^mticism, he is inclined to believe that even for it the current idea of the beautiful is much too narrow. Therefore he thinks a new term must be chosen, which merely indicates the need of expression and of a matter to be expressed, and he sees that this characteristic matter will be found among the Greeks as in modern art. Now that the valuable quality of art, whether we call it ^' beauty " or by some other name, is understood to be a necessary and objective expression of human life and the unity of nature, there is no reason for trying to narrow the scope of its And therefore the thinker who was the first manifestations. to proclaim its concrete objectivity was also the first who in set terms discarded all formal and traditional limitations to the
compass of
its
unity.
In the realm of formative art and of music Schiller had no He made no positive contrispecial powers of appreciation. theory of specific arts^ or of their relations with bution to the His sympathy for landscape seems not to have ach other. wider than that of his generation.^ He treats a thunderbeen storm," with its gloom abruptly broken by lightning, as a case of the ugly whose effect is sublime or rather exalting (" ErheHe restricts the conception of grace to movements bend"). of the human form.* He does not give important aid even in He prothe discrimination of particular forms of poetry. undoubtedly the best nounces the plot of Corneille's Cid
His real literature because it demands no wickedness.* general principles of achievement lay in the sphere of the mdividual arts poetic fancy which are the foundation of all the the springs of life and are profoundly connected with
and
thought.
2
I.
See Schasler, i. 626. .. or o u i^.. W.bchasier, See however the Review of Mattheson's poems, W.,rx\. 343e
64^*
W.,
xi.
570,
I.
See Schasler,
i,
603.
W.,
rrr
xi.
543-
304
II.
the student of Goethe there will appear ^^ 1^^ something like profanity in the attempt to confine his magnificent profusion of ideas within the limits of
Goethe.
To
aesthetic formula.
And
it
must
clearly
be understood that
in
the following pages there is no pretence of gathering the full harvest of his immense activity, but only an effort to insist upon some dominant convictions the importance of which is avouched by the whole course of his ideas concerning art and beauty. The English reader who turns hopefully, for an appreciation of Goethe's aesthetic position, to the most recent and able historians among his countrymen, will experience By common agreement he is a sharp disappointment. treated as a popular writer of the school of Winckelmann, and thus finds no place at all in Hartmann's post- Kantian and Zimmermann ' alike he is history,^ while in Schasler divorced from Schiller and annexed to Mengs and Winckelmann as a pre- Kantian aesthetician. Such a view, though superficially favoured by the order of treatment which Hegel has adopted for a special purpose,* is absolutely at variance with chronology, with Goethe's fundamental ideas and his recorded judgment of his own relation to Kant,* and with his place as the central figure of that creative time, the last decade* of the eighteenth century, when the ideas of a new philosophy were forged by co-workers whose individual contributions can hardly be distinguished to-day. The ground of these contradictory estimates is very simple, and forms a convenient introduction to the study of Goethe's conceptions. Winckelmann, of course, detected the inevitable impact of expression upon beauty. By insisting upon all that we now understand as "expression" it is verbally possible to find in him a doctrine of the significant or characteristic, which in reality he did but apprehend darkly and remotely. Now there is. no doubt at all that Goethe's reflections upon beauty and especially upon art are centrally determined by the antithesis of beauty in the narrower sense and significance or
"^
1 2 3
V.
Hartmann, ^sih.,
i.
i.
Einl.
vii.
Krit. G. d. A.,
Aesth.,
i.
494.
i.
355.
* lb.,
^
* Il>.,
24.
letzte
Einwirkung d. neueren Philosophie, IV., 30. 340. " Diese fiir mich so bedeutende Epoche, das gangenen Jahrhunderts."
Zehnt des
ver-
GOETHE AND WINCKELMANN.

character.
305
It is therefore possible to speak of him as dealing with Winckelmann's problem and nothing more. But such a view neglects the whole essence of the matter. Winckelmann started from abstract beauty, but was compelled, by his historical knowledge and sympathy, to supplement it by a graded intrusion of the expressive, which though necessary to the beautiful, increases as true beauty diminishes. He remained almost wholly within the domain of plastic art, having just a word to say on painting, but not a word on music or poetry. But Goethe, if he dealt with similar elements, approached them in the reverse order. His point of departure was the idea of the characteristic as the excellent in art, that is to say, as the beautiful in the wider sense of the word which we have determined to adhere to. This principle he supplemented at a later time by the limiting postulate of formal beauty, beauty in the narrower sense, chiefly as a safeThis guard against misunderstandings and eccentricities. reversal of Winckelmann's position is essential, not accidental. It was the outcome of the new organ of aesthetic perception which Winckelmann had helped to create, and the germ of a wider and deeper sense of beauty. It originated in the. defence of Gothic architecture against the effete pseudoclassical tradition, and was supported by the widest appreciaIn technical philosophy tion of painting, music, and poetry. Beauty the excellence its significance is quite unmistakable. revealed in art and sesthetic appreciation generally is the datum to be analysed. To assume the unanalysed datum, or its most formal analysis, as a principle, while confessing that another and a thoroughly concrete principle is perplexingly active within and outside it, is candid and suggestive, but To identify the datum with a concrete logically impotent. which leads to a profound analysis, while admitting principle that there is still a border line at which a formal residue of the datum fails to be adequately explained, is a new step in will now consider Goethe's scientific comprehension.
We
Ecsthetic convictions in the latter aspect. I" ^nZf twenty-four years before Hirt's IGothic Architecture, famous article in Horen upon the Beautiful of Art as the Characteristic, there appeared a small, badly-printed,
anonymous book,^ von Deutscher Art

^
u.
Kunst, "
On German
Scherer, iL 82
306
Style
The
and art." The authors were Moser, Herder, and Goethe. contribution of the latter was the short paper, " Deutsche Baukunst," "German architecture," which in spite of an excess in youthful rhetoric Goethe was only twenty-four when it was published is perhaps the profoundest aesthetic utterance of the eighteenth century. For in it we have the germ of those ideas which were to find their full expression eighty years after in the chapter, " On the Nature of Gothic," in Mr. Ruskin's Stones of Venice. I fear that the indifference of our philosophic historians to the former utterance is but too well explained by their unfamiliarity with the latter, and all that it implies. The relation of all work to the life of the individual workman is not indeed insisted on by Goethe, but the point of view which he adopted was one in which this relation was necessarily involved. I will make a few extracts from this short paper, which does not, so far as I am aware, exist in an English translation. .The points to be noted for our theoretical purpose are i. The writer's attitude towards the pseudo-classicism of the late Renaissance.
ii. The sympathy for "Gothic" architecture, and criticism of the kind of disparagement which the name implies.^ iii. The indication of a theory of characteristic art. I will arrange the quotations under these three heads. The subject of the paper is Strasburg cathedral. " i. It is in petty taste,' says the Italian, and ^jteSSisB^c^ Tradition, passes by. Quite childish,' lisps the Frenchman, and triumphantly taps his snuff-box 4 la Grecque. What have you both done, that you should despise it Has not the genius of the ancients, arising from their grave, cast yours into captivity? You crawled under the mighty ruins to steal their proportions, you built your patchwork palaces with the sacred fragments, and deem yourself custodian of the arcana of art, because you can give account of colossal buildings by inch and line. If you had felt more than
'
'
.''
measured, if you had caught the spirit of the masses which astounded you, you would not sipiply have copied, because they did it, and it is beautiful you would have made your designs necessary and true, and living beauty would have sprung from them with creative power.
;
Cf. Stones
of
Venice, vol.
ii.,
"
On Nature
of Gothic."
STRASBURG CATHEDRAL.
"
307
So you have painted your wants with a show of truth and
beauty.
The splendid effect of the columns impressed you you wanted to have columns too, and you built them into walls you wanted to have colonnades, and you surrounded the forecourt of St. Peter's Church with marble passages which lead nowhere, so that mother Nature, who detests and despises the useless and unnecessary, impelled your populace to prostitute them to public cloacae, till you avert your eyes and hold your nose before the wonder of the world. " All this goes on its way the artist's whim serves the rich man's caprice the tourist stares, and our bea-ux esprits, called philosophers, elaborate their art-principles and art-histories out of protoplastic fables, while true men are murdered by the
; ;
;
genius in the forecourt of the mysteries." ^ . . The column ^ is in no sense an element of our dwellings it contradicts the essence of all our buildings. Our houses do not arise out of four columns at four corners ; they arise out of four walls on four sides, which serve instead of columns, exclude columns, and, where you add them, make them a burdensome superfluity." " Beware of dishonouring the name of your noblest artist, and hasten to contemplate his If it gives you an unpleasing impression, or excellent work. none at all, why then fare you well harness your horses and trace in all this the same coincidence of away to Paris "
evil
"...
;
We
genuine racial art-feeling and regrettable national antagonism which so strongly influenced Lessing. It was inevitable that the modern spirit should grow fierce as it turned against saw the tradition which fettered it in every movement. St. Peter's has always been a touchstone of before that Goethe cannot have been the first Renaissance feeling. hostile critic, for at this time he had not seen Rome, and his But information must have been drawn from other writers. his readiness to blaspheme is a striking sign of the times. "When I first went to see the cathedral, ii"Gothic "as a
We
^jy head was full of general conceptions of good reverenced, from hearsay, harmony of masses and purity of form, and was a sworn foe to the confused Under the rubric 'Gothic,' caprices of Gothic decoration. like an article in a dictionary, I had collected all the mistaken
disparaging term,
taste.
1 2
Winckelmann was murdered 1768.

Directed against the
Abbd
Laugier, Scherer, vol.
ii.,
* Goethe."
308
synonyms
that had ever come into my head, ' undefined, disordered, unnatural, a heap of odds and ends, patchwork, overloaded.' No wiser than a people that called the whole world barbarians ' I called everything Gothic that did not fit my system, fi"om the elaborate doll and image work with which our bourgeois aristocracy decorate their houses, to the grave remains of old German architecture, which in view of a few bizarre curves, I censured to the old tune as Quite
'
'
overloaded with ornament and so, on my way, I shuddered at what I expected to see, a misformed, curly-bristled monster. " How unexpected was the feeling with which the sight amazed me, when I stood before the building. My soul was filled by a great and complete impression, which because it was composed of a thousand harmonious details, I was able to taste and enjoy, but in no way to understand and explain. How constantly I returned to enjoy this half-heavenly pleasure, to comprehend in their work the giant-spirit of our elder brothers . . How often has the evening twilight interrupted with friendly rest the eye fatigued by its exploring gaze, when the countless parts melted into complete masses, which, simple and great, stood before my soul, and my powers arose gladly at once to enjoy and to understand. . . How freshly it greeted me in the morning brilliance, how gladly I observed the great harmonious masses, vitalised in their numberless minute parts, as in the works of eternal nature, down to the smallest fibre, all of it form, and all bearing upon the whole; how lightly the enormous firmbased building rises into the air how broken it is, and yet how eternal! And so do I not well to be angry when the German art-scholar, giving ear to envious neighbours, mistakes his own advantage, and disparages this work with the unintelligible term 'Gothic,' when he should be thanking God that he is able to proclaim aloud, This is German building, our building, of which the Italians have none, still less the French.' And if you will not concede yourself this privilege, prove that the Goths really built like this,, in which proof you will find some difficulty." " But you, dear youth, shall be my companion, you who stand there in emotion, unable to reconcile the contradictions which conflict in your soul who now feel the irresistible power of the great totality, and now chide me for a dreamer, that I see beauty, where you see only strength and roughness."
'
'
...
THE CHARACTERISTIC.
3O9
The continuation of the same passage suggests a general theory to justify this "perception of beauty" where others see only strength and roughness. The force of customary language takes Goethe back into the antithesis which he has just transcended. But we must bear in mind throughout that beauty in the largest sense always tends to coincide, as Goethe has just employed the term, with the whole excellence which belongs to fine art, qud fine art, and is appreciated by
aesthetic perception, qiiA aesthetic.
Even
in
Winckelmann we
outside that which is especially distinctively called by the name of beauty, just as Goethe is about to oppose "true" and "great" art to "beautiful" art in the narrower sense. lii. (Continued after " roughness" above.) "Do charaeteriBtic" *^not let a misconception come between us do not let the effeminate doctrine of the modern beautymonger make you too tender to enjoy significant roughness, lest in the end your enfeebled feeling should be able to endure nothing but unmeaning smoothness. They try to make you believe that the fine arts arose from our supposed inclination to beautify the world around us. That is not true For in the only sense in which it could be true it may be asserted by a citizen or artisan, but not by a philosopher." (The art-impulse, as Goethe is about to describe it, would be called an impulse to beatitify things, only by those who include all formative work under beauty, as a citizen may the laying out of a new street, or an artisan the construction of a machine. Goethe's mood as here expressed is very complex he sympathises in substance with the " citizen," but yet feels that he can only make his point clear through the distinction, in itself objectionable, which the philosopher draws. Such, at least, appears to me the true meaning of the passage.) " Art (he continues) is formative long before it is beautiful (fine), and yet is then true and great art, very often truer and For man has in him a forgreater than beautiful art itself. nature, which displays itself in activity as soon as his mative existence is secure so soon as he is free from care and from fear, the demi-god, active in repose, gropes round him for matter into which to breathe his spirit. And so the savage remodels with bizarre traits, horrible forms, and coarse And colours, his " cocos," his feathers, and his own body. though this imagery consists of the most capricious forms
falls
; !
saw and
that " true " beauty
3IO
agree together
yet, without relations of shape, its parts will
for a
single feeling
has created them
into a characteristi(
art.
whole.
Now
acts
this characteristic art is the

lies
only true
When
i;
from inward, single, individual independent feeling, careless and even ignorant of all that h alien to it, then whether born of rude savagery or of cul Of this you set tivated sensibility, it is whole and living. Tht numberless degrees among nations and individuals. more that the soul rises to the feeling of those relations which alone are beautiful and eternal, whose main chords can be demonstrated, whose secrets can only be felt, relations ir which alone the life of the godlike genius rushes forth intc happy melodies the more that this beauty penetrates the being of a mind, seeming to be of one origin with it, so that the mind can tolerate nothing else, and produce nothing else
on what
round
it
Here stands his work . so much the happier is the artist. . approach, and recognise the deepest feeling of truth and beauty in relations issuing from a strong rough German soul, on the narrow and gloomy sacerdotal arena of the middle And below, after attacking the affected and feeble age." painting of his own days, " masculine Albert Diirer, whom the moderns mock at, the most wooden of your forms please
.
;
me
better."
it is true that this early love for Gothic buildings was driven into the background in Goethe's mind by his inclination to " a more developed art " (that of the Greeks), as he tells us in his autobiography ^ ( 1 8 1 1 ). This mention of the subject, however, shows how near it was to his heart, for it
Now
was in this particularly that his later life seemed to him to link itself to the impulses of his early years. The proverb,
is
given us abundantly in age," Again, the order of development in Faust must strike every one as analogous to the poet's own history, the devotion to Helena being superimposed upon the basis of northern life, and leaving its influence behind when the contact ceases. The approximation between art and science, by which, for
for in
"
What we
wish
youth
is
verified for
him by
this connection.
good and evil, Goethe was so greatly him in their common relation to the
1
fascinated, consisted for typical and the charac-
m,
17. 348.
MEYER AND
teristic.
HIRT.
3II
The Critique of the Power ofJudgment, with which alone of Kant's writings he really sympathised, confirmed his conviction of this affinity, and justified in his eyes the " restless impulse " which had always led him to search for the typical or In all this his thought is close to the the fundamental.^ "characteristic," as understood by science as well as in art. Some genera of flowers, for example, seem to him full of His character, others vaguely defined and characterless. researches into the metamorphoses of plants were guided of It is quite plain that course by ideas of an underlying type. the import, character or significance, was always for Goethe the central point in any work which appealed to man, and even, though subject to a Kantian reservation, in any product of nature. 2, But it is quite in accordance with Goethe's Definitions of Eirt and Meyer, dislike of the abstract and incomplete that we find the idea of the " characteristic," as a substantive principle of art, entering into aesthetic not through him, but through his friends Hirt, a critic, and Meyer, an artist, both travellers and learned in the facts of art, and both contributors to Horen"^ ( 1795-8). Their opinions are adduced and criticised by Hegel in the Introduction to the yEsthetic? Meyer who followed Goethe in a relative antagonism to Hirt, fancied that the view which he and Goethe shared was fundamentally different from that which Hirt maintained. But there is really no profound distinction between them, beyond the limitation retained by Goethe which we have already noticed, the super-addition of beauty to significance as a condition under which the latter must appear in art. Hirt, echoing Baumgarten, identified the beautiful with the perfect for eye or ear but he developed the idea of perfection into that of the intention of nature as expressed in generic or specific characters. Meyer, following Goethe, laid down that the principle of (ancient *) art was the significant, but the result of successful treatment was the
;
"Einw.
d. n. Philos.* a.n6.
" Anschauende Urtheilskr.," W., 30. 342 and

It
351.
2 Die Horen, a review in which Schiller and Goethe co-operated. above the reading public at that time, and lived only three years.
was
yEsth.,
See
i. 23, E. Tr. 32 ff. Schiller's letter above.
^ Hirt's aggressive attitude

_
.
u ^ r J the had forced .u

art.
question of the characteristic to be raised even about ancient
312
beautiful.
depend
essentially
Both of these on the
formulae,
as
Hegel points
out,
relation of content to
form and
affirm to begin with that the excellence of art consists in In describing the nature expression adequate to a meaning.
of this meaning there is, we find, a tendency of the extremes to meet, for characterisation which is merely generic or specific and not individual leans to the side of abstraction and classicism as against individualism and romanticism, and points back to Reynolds' arguments in favour of his grand style. And the postulate of " beauty in treatment " may indicate either that the individual is to be conventionalised, or that beauty can be found in individuality by those who shall find the antithesis more fully have eyes to see. stated by Goethe himself, and need only note with regard to these minor writers that by contributing to Horen, and constantly supplying Goethe with material through private correspondence, they helped to animate the movement which during these years was communicating itself to the future leaders of philosophy. 3* '^^^ general results of this active epoch were ooetbe's Analysis of the summarised by Goethe in the dialogue, "The ExceUentinArt. Collector and his Friends "^ (1798), which exhibits his ideas in a form as nearly systematic as any that he cared to give them, and is the first attempt in the history of aesthetic to represent ^ the excellent in art as a concrete into which there enter many degrees and phases of expressiveness. Hirt makes a mistake, Goethe writes' to Schiller in 1797, by not recognising that it would take his explanation as well as Winckelmann's and Lessing's, and many others, to define But, so far, he is quite right, Goethe continues, in Art. insisting on the characteristic and pathetic even in formative " The Collector and his Friends " is practically a dramatiart. sation of the view taken in that letter, and consequently forms a discussion of opinions which I presume to be those of Hirt's paper in Horen,* and turns on a specific and a general question. The specific question arises out of Hirt's assertion that even in Greek art the characteristic is the dominant principle,
We
*^Der Sammler u. die Seinigen," W., 24. 235. For Winckelmann hardly intends to attempt this, though he makes contribution to such a view.
* *
Br.,
*
m,
p.
3.
152.
later work.
See
194 above on Hirt's
BEAUTY AND CHARACTER.
313
and
that no extreme of pain or horror is avoided in it and refers to the conciliation of this account, which is not absolutely denied, with the views of Winckelmann and Lessing, The " character," it is urged on behalf of the Niobe group,
;
appears " only in the most general lines which permeate the work like a spiritual skeleton." This metaphor of the skeleton or framework as the correlative of the characteristic is often in Goethe's mind, and points to an intolerable dualism between the characteristic and the beautiful. But it is not his only view. The general question dealt with in the treatise, starting from the relation of character and beauty, refers to the
demanded by the excellence of art. " Let an artist have wrought a bronze eagle which fully expresses the generic conception of the eagle (this is Hirt's narrow idea of the characteristic), and let him now desire to place it on the sceptre of a Zeus. Will it be suitable ? No, it must have in addition what the artist imparted to the Zeus to make him a god. I see, interrupts the " Characteristiker (supposed, with reason, to represent Hirt) you are referring but I only value it in as far to the grand style of Greek art In the remarkable passage which it is characteristic." as follows, Greek art is not, as the common view of Goethe would lead us to expect, treated as the highest possible, " It
total synthesis of qualities
satisfies,"
"
The
he says, "a high demand; but not the highest." generic conception leaves us cold [this is the ordinary
it
Hirt's "characteristic," which shows how was understood to be from the individual characterisation which we identify with romance and naturalism], the ideal [of the Greek grand style] raises us above ourselves but we want more we want to return to a full enjoyment of the individual, without letting go either the significant or the This enigma can be solved only by beauty it gives sublime. life and warmth to the scientific [still thought of as distinguishing the characteristic '] and softens the significant and lofty so that a beautiful work of art has gone through the whole cycle, and is again a sort of individual, which we are able to make
attitude towards
remote
'
our own."
the characteristic and the ideal become individual Goethe is here, as through the fusing power of beauty. between the conception of beauty as almost always, wavering abstraction or omission, which at the bidding of some principle not clearly understood, softens or, too probably, enfeebles
Thus
314
the harsh outlines of definite individuality, and a conception of it as depending on the insight which discovers in the strongest details of individual portraiture a forcible grace of their own. Goethe never wholly threw off the dualism implied
former view. close of the dialogue, those qualities of artists and art-judges, i.e. of aesthetic percipients, which have been noticed in the course of discussion, are finally reviewed one by one as essential elements in the excellence of art, and are then thrown into a tabular form, constructed so as to present an elaborate analysis of beauty in this its wider sense. ^ In this scheme, each of three essential elements in the is preArt-truth, Beauty, and Finish, excellence of art as the synthesis of two opposite qualities or tendencies, sented one of which is " serious," and the other " playful," while both are mere onesided mannerism as contrasted with their Thus Art-truth is synthesis which alone can be called style. the union of the purely imitative and the fanciful tendency, Beauty of the characteristic and the inclination to mere decorative curvilinear form (after Hogarth's theory), and Finish of " minute accuracy " and " expressive sketchiness." And further, Art-truth, Beauty, and Finish, must themselves be united in order to make up the excellence of art. Here, it will be observed, we do not escape from the dualism involved in the appearance of beauty as contributory
in the
At
the
to that peculiar excellence of fine art, which must be set down as coincident with the beautiful in the widest sense. But yet the spell of a beauty that is devoid of content or defies analysis is now broken for ever. For the beauty constituted
I transcribe the table with
a translation
in brackets.
Ernst allein
(Serious only).
Ernst und Spiel verbunden

(Serious and bined).
playful
com-
Spiel allein (Playful only).

Individuelle Neigung (Individual tendency).
Individuelle Neigung (Individual tendency).
Ausbildung in's AUgemeine of a quality (Formation having general value).

Styl
(Style).
Manier
(Mannerism).
Manier
(Mannerism). Phantomisten
(Capricious fancy).
Nachahmer
(Copyists). Characteristiker (Artists who seize the essential characters). Kleinkiinstler (Minute pedants).
Kunstwahrheit
(Artistic truth).
Schonheit
(Beauty).
Undulisten (Decorative
ture).
grace
curva-
VoUendung
(Finish, completion).
Skizzisten
(Expression
pletion.
Impressionist
without
com?)
ANALYSIS OF BEAUTY AS CONCRETE.
315
synthesis is not a limit that enfeebles expression, but the combination of two kinds of expressiveness, that is, of characterisation by essential attributes, and formal or decorative symbolism. From such a construction of the idea of beauty it is only a step to regarding the other syntheses as subordinate to it no less than the factors of its own synthesis. In a theory of expression, taking account of its successive gradations, the general decorative principles or "curves of beauty," would rank lowest and condition all else; the "capricious fancy" devoid of substance and significance, would be considered as a mere failure to seize the import of things, and as possessing less content than the conscientious " copying " of nature, in which " pedantic minuteness " would be an aspect or element. And at a higher stage, as the first achievement of the penetrative imagination, the " impressionist sketch " would be considered to herald and precede the full grasp of "characteristic " reality in all its detail and with all its import. By some such modified presentation, which would not involve any considerable change of principle, we should obtain an anticipation in all essentials of the most recent analyses which deal with beauty according to its grades of symbolic or expressive power. The unimportant position assigned by Goethe to capricious fancy is especially noteworthy, as a criticism on the constantly recurring fallacies which confuse the imaginative with the
fictitious.
by Goethe's
The restriction of this dialogue to the arts of sculpture and painting enhances its value, because it was precisely in these arts that the principles of Lessing and Winckelmann, to which Goethe's letter referred, had their strongest hold, and if " the characteristic and pathetic" could be vindicated in this region, their recognition in the other arts would follow a fortiori. From this time forward beauty was necessarily considered in respect of its content, and formalistic theory, the acceptance of data of aesthetic enjoyment as ultimate, was, strictly speaking, an anachronism. Even the study of Winckelmann (1805) which Goethe began to prepare soon ^ after writing this dialogue, was mainly directed * to insisting on the organic evolution of art as an epoch-making discovery.
1
1799,
'^'
'^>
5-
162.
See
p.
242 above.
3l6
It
4.
was through the life-work of Goethe and and their many friends and contemporaries through the development of the Kantian aesthetic judgment, limited by abstraction and subjectivity, into an objective concrete content which grows with the life and mind of man, that the data of modern aesthetic were finally prepared for incorporation in the answer to its problem. Their revival of the German theatre, as a form of art, gave the world little of permanent value beyond the two parts of Faust but their reflective synthesis of the Greek and the Briton,' by which they continued the work of Lessing, typifies the revolution
Schiller,
which
have attempted to trace

If
in the principal
spheres of
aesthetic appreciation.
no new
art
for music was not directly affected sophy did and it was amid the fermentation of this last ten years, whose tendencies I have been attempting to sketch,
;
crowned this revolution by it yet a new philo-
that the first great organic thinkers of the nineteenth century gathered the convictions of their early manhood.
*
Schiller's verses
p.
on the representation of
Voltaire's
Mahomet
at
Weimar.
See
238 supra.
CHAPTER
OBJECTIVE IDEALISM.
scueuine
XII.
SCHELLING AND HEGEL
"Science attained its absolute standpoint in ^' Schelling's philosophy, and although art had previously begun to assert its peculiar nature and dignity in relation to the highest interests of humanity, yet it was now that the actual notion of art and its place in scientific theory were discovered."^
In Hegel's opinion, expressed in this passage, the true line of philosophical succession ran from Schiller to Schelling. Hegel himself was born in 1770, Schelling in 1775 but the younger of the two friends for some time took the lead, and was a professor lecturing to crowded audiences before Hegel's name began to be known. From Hegel's correspondence with Schelling in 1795 we can see something of the intellectual excitement which the two friends shared under the influence of Kant, Fichte, and Schiller, whose Esthetic letters in Horen for that year Hegel mentions as a masterpiece that had greatly delighted him.* Taken in connection with these early letters, and with his own first essays in philosophy * wholly on the lines of Fichte, Schelling's important works of 1800 and 1 802-3, the System of the Transcendental Idealism and the Philosophy of Art * show conclusively how his mind was carried forward under Schiller's influence. For Schelling continually refers to Schiller and Winckelmann, who furnished him with the objective material by which he enlarged into a historical and metaphysical theory the Kantian ideas respecting art as related to nature and to genius, which form at this time the framework of his thought. The term "absolute,"
;
Hegel's JBsth., i. ; E. Tr., p. 120, and see ch. xi. above, p. 286. H.'s Briefe, i. 16. 8 1794-5, e.^. Vom Ich als Princip d. Philosophie. * The FMlosophy of Art was delivered in lectures, but was not published Parts of it appeared in other lectures about 1802. till after Schelling's death. See preface to vol. v. of the Werke.
1 8
817
3l8
and the idea of construing the objective unity, to which Kant pointed, and which Schiller helped to substantiate, in terms
of an Ego, a principle somehow analogous with the "self" as shown in will and knowledge, were drawn from Fichte. Hegel, in one of the letters already alluded to, referring to Schelling's earliest Fichtean tract, writes to him as follows, " From Kant's system and its ultimate completion I expect a revolution in Germany, which will start from principles already present and only needing to be worked out in general But there bearings, and applied to all existing knowledge. will always be a kind of esoteric philosophy, and the idea of God as the absolute Ego will belong to it." ^ This is a foreboding of the identification which constitutes the stumblingblock and the attraction of objective idealism, the identification of the Deity with an immanent unity of things, not possessing For Fichte separate existence or personal self-consciousness. its substance was to this absolute unity was a phrase only be given by his successors. Schelling, in attempting this adventure, assigns to art and beauty as an objective synthesis a position in the scheme of reality even higher than that which subsequent theory concedes to them.
;
shall sufficiently understand Schelling's place in the general history of aesthetic if we briefly consider
i.
We
The
objectivity
which he ascribes to
art
and beauty
in
its
connection with his absolute standpoint. ii. The dynamical and historical treatment of the antithesis between ancient and modern life and art. iii. His contributions to the estimate and classification of the particular arts. I purposely spoke of Schelling's place in the " general history of aesthetic. His criticisms and appreciations of individual works of art, and of particular periods and tendencies, are of too great mass to be at all thoroughly treated here. It is hard to say how much Hegel owes to him, or how far they are both drawing from common sources among the data of aesthetic. The great treatise on the Philosophy of Art was not published before Hegel's death, but he may have heard it and would certainly hear about it, or meet with it in MS., when delivered as lectures in 1802 and after. And many of its ideas were made known in published papers and addresses.
Br.,
I.
15 (179s).
BEAUTY DEFINED.
319
There is very little in Hegel's Esthetic which might not have been suggested, in however bizarre or negative a mode, by observation and theories that are to be found in Schelling. i. If we bear in mind the essential ideas of ODjecttTrttyof Art and Beauty. Kant and Schiller, a few quotations from Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) will show us how he took up their suggestions into an audacious theory. " The whole system," he writes in the conclusion of this work, " falls between two extremes, of which one is denoted by the intellectual intuition [which Kant aims at], the other by the
Eesthetic intuition [the substance of Schiller's system]. What the intellectual intuition is for the philosopher, the aesthetic intuition is for his object. The former as merely necessary to the philosopher's peculiar tendency of mind, does not occur in the ordinary consciousness as such the latter, which is nothing but the intellectual intuition made universal or objective, at least may occur in every consciousness. From this it may be seen that and why philosophy as philosophy can never have universal validity.^ The one thing to which absolute objectivity is given, is Art. Take away, it may be said, the objectivity of art, and it ceases to be what it is, and becomes philosophy give philosophy objectivity, and it ceases to be philosophy, and becomes Art. Philosophy, attains the highest, but it brings to that point, so to speak, only a fraction of the man. Art brings the whole man as he is to the cognition of the highest, and this is the eternal distinction and the marvel of art." ^ " Every aesthetic production starts from an essentially infinite separation of the two activities [the conscious one of freedom, and the unconscious one of nature drawn from Kant's treatment of Art in relation to Genius] which are separated in all free productions. But as these two activities are to be represented in the product as in union, this product represents an infinite in finite form. Now the infinite represented in finite form is Beauty. The fundamental character of every work of art, which comprehends in it the two former characters [infinite meaning and infinite reconciliation or satis; ;
* Plainly a reminiscence of Schiller's ysth. Br., 27 near the end on art as addressing the whole man. The superiority here assigned to art over philosophy is the distinctive point in which Hegel and Schelling differ. Cf. ysth., Br., 15, and p. 295 sup. 2 Werke, 3. 630.
320
taken as therefore Beauty,
faction
art."
*
repose, a reference to Winckelmann] is and without beauty there is no work of The subsequent passage, which Schasler* professes
himself unable to understand, is a simple explanation, following Kant, of the sublime as a more purely subjective reconciliation than that embodied in beauty, depending on an effort * of mind less directly prescribed by the object of perception than is the case with the beautiful par excellence. " The product of art," he says in another place, " is distinguished from the organic product chiefly in this, (a) that the organic being represents previous to separation what aesthetic production represents subsequently to separation but reunited (d) that organic production does not issue from consciousness, and therefore not from the infinite contradiction * which is the condition of Eesthetic production. The organic product of nature is therefore not necessarily beautiful."* The last clause states a point of view distinctive of the " But this untime, which we are now tending to abandon. known, which in this case (in art) brings into unexpected harmony the objective' and the conscious activity, is nothing other than that Absolute [Schelling's footnote calls it " Das Urselbst," the fundamental self or unconscious but immanent principle of the world the absolute ego of Hegel's letter above] which contains the universal ground of the pre-established harmony between the conscious and the unconscious." ^ He then connects the operation of the unconscious in artproduction with Kant's doctrine of genius. The absolute has no existence apart from its expressions. The place of art in Schelling's philosophy is sufficiently
; ;
infinite contradiction " and " infinite reconciliation " or solution may be best understood by thinking of an attempt to bring disparate ideas and processes into terms of each other. The failure to do this is the " infinite contradiction," as e.g. moral action never quite satisfies the moral will. The " infinite reconciliation " is the discovery of an idea or
W., 3. 620-1. G. d. A., 2. 834. 8 Kant, K. d. U., p. 100. * This recurring phrase "
^
process or product in which the disparates cease to diverge and are both of
them
s
"satisfied."
W., 3. 621. 8 Kant's " Nature " and " Freedom," as before. This passage shows with striking clearness how his postulate of an underlying unity was developed by
Schelling.
THE ABSOLUTE STANDPOINT.

indicated
32 I
by these quotations, but one more may be added which sums up the whole matter in the most striking way. " The system of knowledge is to be regarded as complete
when
it returns to its first principle, Transcendental Philosophy, therefore, is only complete when it can show the identity (mz. the principle that ike same activity which is productive in action with consciousness, is productive in the world without consciousness) the highest solution of its whole problem, in its principle (the Ego). It is therefore postulated that this activity, conscious and unconscious at once, shall be shown in the subjective, in consciousness itself. Such an activity is the aesthetic activity alone, and every work of art can only be understood as the product of such a one. The ideal world of art and the real one of objects are therefore products of one and the same activity the coincidence of the two (the conscious and the unconscious) without consciousness^ gives the real world, with consciousness the aesthetic world. The objective world is only the primitive and still unconscious poetry of mind the universal organon of philosophy, and the keystone of its entire arch, is the philosophy of
art.
here before us in the plainest language both the standpoint " in philosophy and the new conception which Hegel points in his account of Schelling. relation to Kant and Schiller is evinced by every passages from which my quotations are taken. hear nothing as yet of the supra-sensuous and theosophic world of beauty, into which pseudo- Platonic abstractions have nothing but the Schelling fell in later years. answer, in terms of Fichte and Schiller, to the Kantian demand for an underlying unity between nature and freedom. More especially we are to observe that the Absolute does not exist in the form of consciousness, except in the human race, and that the ideas or archetypes' are the particular forms Often we in which it is revealed to aesthetic perception.
" absolute of art, to His close line of the
We have
We
We
Coincidence of the conscious and unconscious activity withour consciousness seems to mean that organic beings which end by being conscious, are In art, he says, the built up causally without the operation of consciousness. an unconscious product is consciously built up. 1 everse is the case ;
'^
W., 3. 349Urbilder.
322
The might think that we are reading Schopenhauer.^ "Absolute" standpoint is what we more popularly call the
negatives the idea of irrational conmerely the of idle reservadefinite attributes of a systematic universe tions in knowledge, or dualistic separation between the orders It rests on the conviction of human freedom, not of things. as alien to nature, but as rooted in the system to which nature If belongs not as supernatural therefore, but as natural. Nature and Freedom are hostile or disconnected, the one is conditioned by the other. If they are expressions of the same principle, then their apparent contradictions are modes of cooperation, and each, as expressing the absolute whole which includes all conditions (noi, which is abstract, undefined, and devoid of conditions) is itself absolute, or free from any interference other than that ultimately rooted in its own nature. The free faith, courage, and enterprise, implied in such a standpoint are, historically speaking, characteristic of the modern spirit, and reach the extreme of audacity in many thinkers to whose views the philosophy of the Absolute, as they understand it, is in diametrical antagonism. But whatever may have been its follies and its extravagances, no misunderstanding is possible of the main tendency of objective Idealism, as we have watched it developing from Kant's tentative solution of the antithesis of the age. It simply consists in the vindication of concrete unity or rational system as the nature of the world in which we live. Inner and outer, natural and supernatural, spiritual and material, are henceforward terms that have lost their meaning, except in reference to the higher and lower purposes of man. And the principal instrument in this revolution has been the growing belief in the objectivity of the aesthetic judgment, as a union of sense and reason. ii. It has been said that the fundamental differ_.,.., _ ^ Hlstoncal Treat_ m i ment of " Ancient ence between ancient and modern philosophy lies andMoaern.' -^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ihat the One came before the other.
standpoint.
ditions in causation
modern
It
for rational conditions are
-i
1 E.g. W., 3. 371. "Music is the archetypal rhythm of Nature and the Universe, which by means of this art breaks through into the world of secondary existence " {der abgebildeten Welt). 2 Cf. Goethe's lines, " Ins Innere der Natur," especially the end, " Vor allem doch zu priifen ist Ob Kern du oder Schale bist."
INFINITE " FORM,
323
The same is true of the general contrast between the antique and the modern. Thus the modern is never simple; it is
always, so to speak, on the top of something else always charged with a contradiction, with a reminiscence, in one word, with a history.
;
poetry
Schiller's analysis of the reflective spirit in the sphere of had done something to focus the growing sense of ' this peculiarity in a distinct conception of development. For
Schelling, with his pronounced idea of an underlying unity, such a conception became a central problem of philosophy and with Schiller constantly before his mind, he persistently refers a whole nest of antitheses concerning the "ancient and modern " to a principle which he endeavours to expound in a highly abstract form. In this abstract form the principle in question turns on the opposition between " Finite " and "Infinite." The demand, it
which was fulfilled by Greek mythology, was directed to the representation of the Infinite within the Finite, while that involved in Christianity is rather to subordinate the Finite to the Infinite.^ Obviously, in giving a meaning to these highly formal antitheses, the application of which is in one writing actually reversed,' the whole question is, which are
is said,
to be taken as the defining terms. And there is no doubt that however the expressions are arranged, the defining term is Finite for ancient mythology, and Infinite for Christianity. The intended contrast may be fairly paraphrased thus that in the ancient world the intellectual or ideal import of objects
:
or mythological persons was measured by the carrying capacity, so to speak, that is, by the power of adequate representation, inherent in such objects or persons as given to fancy or perception. The god, for example, meant no more than could fairly be taken as exhibited in the form attributed to him. The symbolism of spiritual things in sensuous forms was therefore adequate, but only by sacrificing range and depth in the spiritual things themselves. In the modern or Christian world, on the other hand, the intellectual or spiritual import is dominant, and refuses to be measured by the carrying capacity of any object or person presented to fancy
1 Principally in the tract on Naive and Sentimental Poetry, which Schelling iquotes largely in the " Philosophy of Art."
W., W.,
5.
5.,
430 (" The Philosophy of Art

Preface.
").
324
or perception. The Christ, for example, or the Virgin Mary, Instead suggests an inexhaustible wealth of spiritual ideas. of an adequate symbolism there is, therefore, only an inadequate or suggestive symbolism, in other words, an allegory. This recurrent formula of finite and infinite, wherever it is used in Schelling with reference to the imaginative basis of art, seems to mean that in the one case the infinite (ideal) is narrowed down to the finite (sensuous), and in the other the finite (sensuous) is racked and stretched and brought to an expressiveness more like that of feeling and thought, to admit It is indeed painful to us, the import of the infinite (ideal). and we hold it false, when we are told that modern art is essentially allegory, which is the conclusion that Schelling draws from the entire subordination of symbol to import in the modern imagination. But we must recall what was said in the earlier chapters of this work respecting the power exerted by a profound import in exhausting the significance of the In fact, art which sensuous object on which it is imposed. is in this strict technical sense allegorical, by suggesting more than it can adequately convey, is not mechanical, arbitrary or conventional, which are the faults of common allegory, but is likely to strain every resource of natural expressiveness ta the furthest limit, although, when all is done, more remains behind in the shape of mere suggestion. In a lecture of the year 1802 (published 1803) " On the historical construction of Christianity" * the same antithesis is stated in another form. Christianity is here contrasted with the Greek religion as the historical with the natural view of the universe. The conception is ultimately the same as that just examined. The modern man, it is maintained, has been taught to regard the universe as a moral kingdom,^ a world
of change and movement in which a power and unity is revealed, greater and more durable than any isolated manifestation of it. The divine itself is made known to him not as a
permanent figure, but as a vanishing historical personage, whose abiding with the world is not sensuous but ideal. For the Greek, the gods were permanent objective parts of nature, and the world was a fixed system without essential movement or progression. Those who are familiar with the politico-ethical
1
W.,
5.
286
ff.
All this seems suggested
by Kant's Religion innerhalb
tier
Grenzen
d.
R.
V.
THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY.
325
Standpoint of Plato and Aristotle will feel the profound justice of these ideas.^ The notion of a world-evolution was wholly alien to the Greeks. on the contrary, it is urged by Schelling, are in our whole life founded on history. And history belongs to the world of mind, not to the world of nature. The entire medium and texture of modern life is thus ideal in the sense that it is charged with traditions, and principles, and conceptions of a moral or providential order, interwoven in human history, in which we recognise that man has his being. Obviously this contrast has only a relative truth. deny to the Greek a historical consciousness because his historical consciousness is lost to us. Yet after all it remains
We
We
true that he lived

this result.
life
by sight and we
live
by
fact that his life lies at the root of ours is
faith. The mere enough to produce
of our life is succession, that of his succession can be a medium of life only through ideas. For the Christian, history is the symbol of God.* The effect of such a conception on the theory of art is to exhibit modern beauty as charged with a burden of ideal meaning which is hostile to the simpler forms of sensuous expression, and taxes to the utmost the capacities of the most varied and flexible media. And more strictly within the field of art we find the same principle applied by Schelling in the remarkable paper " On Dante in a philosophical aspect." * This paper was the basis of my treatment of Dante in ch. vii., and it is now only necessary to point its reference to Schelling's view of modern The contrast of finite and infinite or of nature and art. history becomes, in its application to the particular work of art, The " subjectivity the contrast of genus and individual, the modern mind by its reflective and historical forced upon basis asserts itself in art as individuality, whereas in the Greek world expression was abstract, "exemplary" or typical, and the utterance rather of the racial than of the This conception is no doubt suggested or individual genius. reinforced by Wolfs treatment of the Homeric poems as a racial rather than an individual achievement. The law of modern poetry, till the great modern epic shall
The medium
was
coexistence.
And
^ " 3
Cf. the Erdgeist's
See Newman's Introduction to Ar. song in Faust.

1802-3, W.,
5.
Politics,
conclusion.
152.
326
be written,
\\
^ is, Schelling writes, ^ in the paper on Dante, " that the individual shall form into a whole that portion of the world which is revealed to him, and shall create his mythology for himself out of the material of his time, its history and its science. For as the ancient world was universally the world of genera, so is the modern world that of individuals in the former the universal is really the particular, the race acts as an individual (Wolfs theory of the Epos) in the latter, on the contrary, the starting point is the particular, which necessarily becomes universal. In the former, for this very reason, everything is permanent, imperishable number has, so to speak, no power, as the universal idea coincides with that of the individual in the latter, change and movement are the abiding law no closed circle, but only one extensible to infinity by means of individuality can contain its principles. And because universality belongs to the essence of poetry, it is a necessary requirement that through the height of peculiarity the individual should again become of universal import, and through the completeness of particularity should again become absolute. It is through this character of absolute individuality, of utter incomparability with everything else, which his poem possesses, that Dante is the creator of modern art, which cannot be conceived apart from this arbitrary necessity and necessary arbitrariness." The individual, it will be observed, has in the modern world to create his own mythology. The belief expressed elsewhere* that " Natur-philosophie " is the first adumbration of the future world-mythology, may be taken as an anticipation of the Modem Painters, in as far as the essence of the latter work is to disclose the rational and symbolic content of natural phenomena. In affirming, therefore, that mythology is necessary to Art, Schelling is only demanding a certain range of fancy, organised in terms relevant to the expressive powers of particular arts, and possessed of a certain universal recognition or validity. Shakespeare, for example, he regards as having created his own mythology.* Mythology which is used, as
;
; ; ; ;
* I.e. a poem that shall summarise the modern world and be its single work, The idea that we are now in as Homer was that of the early Greek world. the " rhapsode " stage, the stage of utterance which will one day make up a whole, is plainly a bizarre application of Wolfs ideas.
W.,
s.
154.
s Jb.,
443-5
( Philosophy of Art").
* lb.,
445.
MODERN BEAUTY.
327
the antique mythology in modern poetry, he sets down as sheer frigid formalism.* The qualities of modern sentiment and imagination, which all these antitheses are intended to embody, stand in essential relation to the comparative importance and elaboration of different species of art in ancient and in modern times. The sensuous vehicles of artistic expression have different capacities and are appropriate to different modes of feeling and utterance. Therefore the classification of the several arts is in immediate dependence on the view adopted as to the line of progress which is to be ascribed to aesthetic imagination and sensibility. It is very remarkable that Schelling's general definition of beauty* coincides with the formula which he applies to ancient imagination in contrast with modern " the presentation of the infinite within the finite." It is clear, from what has been said, that this formula must be interpreted so as to include both sides of the antithesis, with one side of which it is at first sight identical. Modern beauty is still the presentation of the infinite in the finite, but in it the finite, as 1 endeavoured to explain, is both degraded into an inadequate symbol, and is also racked and burdened to the uttermost, so that it may take on something of the character of the infinite which it has to express. It agrees with the whole course of our inquiry to find that, in a natural and unsophisticated sense, antique beauty and beauty proper coincide, while in order to bring modern beauty under the head of beauty proper the defining term needs a good deal of interpretation, 'iiI" the discourse " on the relation of Fornie Particular *^^' mative Art to Nature," ^ Schelling brings together the conception of the imitation of nature in a new and profound sense with the conception of characteristic beauty. Having liberated the latter from the contradiction which Goethe suffered to remain in it, he applies the joint result to the distinction between sculpture as the peculiarly antique, and painting as the peculiarly modern art. The fault of the old view that art aims at the imitation of nature, which gave no explanation how the beautiful which was to be imitated differed from the ugly which was not, lay, as he points out, in regarding Nature as a lifeless aggregate of The moment that Nature is recognised as a living objects.
TV., 5.
443.
See above,
p. 319.
W.,
7.
287 (1807).
328
whole, the expression of reasonable powers, the rule of " imi" tation," and the aim of " idealisation " becomes clear. must transcend the given form in order to restore it as inEven Winckelmann, telligible, vital, and genuinely felt."' who had a true feeling for nature, did not, so Schelling continues, explain that form is beautiful purely because and in as
We
far as
sation "
reveals the idea. The common demand^ for " idealiimplies that beauty is negatively related to reality. But this is not the case on the contrary, the value of true idealisation is to reveal the vital and essential in nature. Thus the negative notion of the ideal, or of characterisation as opposed to the ideal, is defective. Form is not a limit imposed ab extra on body it is spontaneous and positive, the expres" When the artist seizes the look sion of a creative force.
it
; ;
and essence of the idea which works in the individual, and makes it emphatic, he forms the individual into a self-existent " Nature is characteristic world, a genus, an eternal type." * from its first beginnings," up to the human form and the
;
characteristic persists throughout as the operative foundation of the beautiful.* Goethe's comparison " of the characteristic in art to the skele-
ton of a body is here admirably criticised and supplemented. The skeleton is not separable frorri, or prior to, or more real than the soft expressive parts which it supports. The true characteristic corresponds to the expression of the whole figure, flesh and bones, active and passive. The framework can never be justly contrasted with the completed form and its beauty. Here, then, in the full task laid upon the artist we have the point of the difference between sculpture and painting. Sculpture, the essentially ancient art, cannot cope with the "characteristic variety" of nature; it does not represent space, but has its space in it [is in real space] and is therefore obliged Thus it can only repreto reduce its world almost to a point. sent such beauty as remains beautiful when treated as a single and simple whole. The painter, who belongs distinctly to the modern world, has all creation before him, and can use all grades of the characteristic and apparently less beautiful It must be as contributory to the wider totality of his work.
1
W.,
7.
299.
* Jb.,
^
302.
* lb.,
304.
* lb., 307.
In
Der
â?nmler
u. die S.
SCULPTURE AND PAINTING.
329
granted, however, that in conformity with the very natural inconsistency which pursues us throughout, SchelHng is constantly tempted to treat the simplest and most uniform beauty as the highest and truest, following the tradition which at the same time he breaks down. The distinction between sculpture and painting is further examined on its merits and with a true feeling of their relation, but is expressed in language that bears traces of superstition. Sculpture^ presents its ideas by means of bodily things; painting by an almost spiritual medium. Such phrases suggest but do not clearly explain the difference of expressive capacity between carved material of a uniform colour, and pigments
upon a flat surface. The conclusion, however, is just he says in effect, is fettered by its material and cannot express more of the mind than is very definitely revealed in permanent and tangible relations of form it fails seriously if overcome by the matter with which it deals, and in any case cannot carry spiritual expression beyond a point at which the powers of the material are fairly balanced by the expressiveness imposed upon them. Painting, on the
laid
;
sculpture,
other hand,
that is) fettered
:
is
its
ideal throughout {in comparison with sculpture, " pictures are pictures, and not things " it is less
;
by
its
medium than
sculpture,
and therefore, though
its fall is greater if^ it sets matter above spirit (on the principle corruptio optimi pessima), yet it has a far higher capacity of subordinating its medium to a spiritual import.* Schelling's aesthetic sensibility begins here to show its limitations. He is, by personal preference, chiefly concerned to prove that soft or rapturous expression is consistent with and this predilection happens to do characteristic beauty service, because the characteristic had always been good But when he comes regarded as primarily hard and rigid. to treat Guido Reni as the genuine painter of "soul," we
;
1 lb.,
7.
316.
this
" if" in view of following note. " Colour is no mere delightful quality See Pater, Renaissance, p. 63. of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit." I cannot pass unnoticed Schasler's strangely curious misreading (Krit. G. d. A., p 854) of this passage in Schelling, which he spends half a p.ige in satirising as self-contradictory, because, from neglect of the context, he has construed a hypothetical expression as categorical The reader of his 1200 pages is forced to wonder whether much of his time might not have been saved if the author had been more lavish of his own.
2
N..
330
recognise that he is on the downgrade of sentimentalism, and that the superstitions of his later life are casting their
shadows
before. Schelling's systematic classification of the arts is of value rather as the first thorough-going attempt at such a classification, and as giving occasion, by the way, for a good deal of analysis of their respective powers and peculiarities, than for any permanent importance in the leading distinction on which it is based. It plainly follows Kant's division, to which, it will
be remembered, Kant himself attached but little importance, into arts of speech and of form, adding to the latter category the art of music, which Kant placed apart under the head
of the beautiful play of sensations. But Schelling connects this main division of the arts with the same abstract principle which represents to him the difference between the modern and the antique. The arts of the Real series are embodiments of the Infinite in the Finite the principle, as we saw,* of beauty in general, and more especially of antique beauty, Those of the Ideal series are cases of the subordination of the Finite to the Infinite.^ It is here more plain than ever that the terms of the two antitheses do not occupy strictly contrasted places. In both of them the Infinite, that is, ideas, is the matter represented, and the relatively Finite, the form, is in both the medium of representation. But in the one the Finite retains its sensuous or material limitations to the full, in the other it is tyrannised over by the meaning and assumes in some degree an infinite or ideal character. Language is a case of this principle. The word loses its individual material being its look, shape and sound* become a matter of indifference and we go straight to the idea which it suggests. The two antitheses would express their intention more intelligibly if they spoke of Representation of the Infinite in Finite form, and Representation of the Infinite in Infinite form, it being understood that form can only be infinite relatively and through an extension of its natural functions. Now as the second formula, that of modern art and of the ideal series, falls outside the definition of beauty proper, which
P. 327 supra.
fr., 5.
630.
that in art
its
^ I
do not admit
sound
is indifferent.
SYSTEMATIC TREATMENT OF THE ARTS.

is
33
one with the formula of ancient art and of the real series, to find a view of historical succession underlying the distinction between the two series. Traces of such a view, but traces only, are to be found in the remark* that the ancients were plastic in their poetry, while modern poetry is (as in Dante) far more arbitrary and capricious and
we might have expected
all
but impossible to reduce to typical species. observed that the contrast between sculpture as typically antique and painting as typically modern was rightly drawn elsewhere.
We
The other and very remarkable feature of the construction of these two series, is the involution of "powers," or phases within phases, by the repeated application of an identical formula to elements previously obtained by that same formula. This process prevails indeed throughout Schelling's philosophy. Thus in the realm of mind (itself an Ideal unity) Art and Philosophy were respectively unities in which the Real and the Ideal predominated in Art, again, the two series in question are unities of the Finite and Infinite, in each of which one of these principles prevails over the others. And, moreover, within each series there is a predominant real, a predominant ideal, and their " indifference " or equally-balanced unity. Thus in Poetry, whose forms constitute the ideal series, the relatively real is the Lyric, the ide.a\ par excellence is the Epic, and the synthesis of the two is the Dramatic. In the real series the real par excellence is music, the relatively ideal is painting (I cannot think why), and the synthesis of the two is sculpture. Within sculpture again Architecture appears as a sub-form distinct from the bas-relief and from sculpture in the round, as real par excellence and corresponding to music frozen music, as Schelling calls it. I do not adduce all this as of any value in its substantive application as handled by Schelling, but for two historical In the first place, any thread of systematic conreasons. however quaint or unreal, which causes a complete nection, and impartial survey to be made for the first time of the whole range of a subject, is of immense historical importance Schelling's elaborate discussion of and stimulating effect. music, for example, is a new thing in eesthetic theory and however much we may regret the parallel drawn between it and architecture, yet the conception of it as representing ' pure
;
W.,
5.
632.
2 lb., 5.
502.
332
and
movement abstracted from objects, and the real form of things events, has much in common with Schopenhauer and with
later conceptions.
But secondly, whether or no Hegel's
dialectic
may have
originated in these ideas of Schelling, the triplicity in synthesis (suggested of course by Kant) and involution by reapplication of identical formulae, are important principles in all philosophical construction, though readily lending themselves It is incontestably true that analogous to a futile ingenuity. phases repeat themselves, and repeat themselves cumulatively, in mind and nature. The world moves forward not merely from one condition to another, but as a whole of conditions, each of which reproduces itself according to its law of differentiation within the general phase which the whole has assumed according to this same law.' Thus the general idea that the entire system of the arts recurs on different planes and with a different centre, as the whole of life is pushed forward into special conformity with one type of expression, by the results of its own activity, is thoroughly just, and is a principle which might be the foundation of a synthesis between a linear classification of the arts and their history in time. Not the mere progression from art to art, but the movement of the characteristic centre of artistic utterance would be the point in which history would justify classification. Schelling's own serial arrangement is, however, merely a If we ask what it substantially piece of arbitrary formalism. In what sense are lyric, epic and means, there is no answer. dramatic poetry a second series corresponding to music, paintare not told that the order of the ing and sculpture ? series is an ascending order either in evolution or in power of presentation, and however we read them we cannot make it such. The logical framework of the arrangement seems not to correspond to any progression in the qualities of art as art, and we should give it the best effect by reading the real series backwards from sculpture to music, and the ideal forwards from lyric to dramatic poetry, which would destroy the correlation of the terms and therefore cannot be intended. Though a rough idea of progress from perception to fancy may have
We
* Thus we might say, in the Christian world there the Greek Christian, and the Christian Christian.
is
the heaihen Christian
SCHELLINGS ACHIEVEMENT.
333
decided Schelling to do his best with Kant's suggestion, the double series really cuts the development in two the triplets of the separate syntheses are independent of each other, and their cross analogies are futile. Any pair of arts can be thus regarded as analogous, and there is hardly any pair that has not been so regarded. What just estimate of the value of the arts is formed by Schelling, as in the case of music, is in spite of the serial arrangement and not derived from it. Such parallel series have been the foundation of many subsequent classifications of the arts, even of that proposed by Schasler. But unless it is thoroughly explained why there are two series, and how the beginning of the one is related to the close of the other, and, if cross correspondences are alleged, why they are really essential to the notion of the arts supposed to correspond, I see no meaning in arrangements of The problem of classification is to illustrate the this kind.
;
between individuals either in origin or in function cannot see that the superficial resemblance I or in both. between sculpture and the drama, or between epic poetry (some prefer to say lyric) and painting, throws any light on any question of the kind. Hartmann's distinction, coincident with that of Schelling's series, between arts of perceptive semblance and arts of imaginative semblance, will be discussed in its place. With Schelling we are fairly launched on nineteenth century The objectivity and necessary historical continuity cesthetic. Schelling of the sense of beauty as a supreme expression of the absolute or it to be the supreme expression will have divine reality as uttering itself through man, has become an axiom of philosophy. The negative notions of the beautiful and of the characteristic are shown to be imperfect, and their The principle of progressive and opposition to be unreal. cumulative synthesis, according to a law which is constantly re-applied to its own results, is exhibited, though incoherently and inconsistently, in a classification of the fine arts. All this was really achieved, but how far it entered into history by affecting his successors is a different question. The " Philosophy of Art" was given in lectures and circulated in MS., but probably had only a partial effect. I cannot say for But the published certain whether it was known to Hegel. lectures and papers and the System of Transcendental Idealism, contain all that is of importance, except the detailed treatment
affinity
334
of the
arts, and there can be no doubt that Hegel, whil< largely drawing from common sources, was also, as is showr by the lectures on Esthetic, immensely influenced by Schell ing's views of art and of aesthetic philosophy. The genius and character of the two men were extraordinarily different, and extraordinarily suitable the one to gc Schelling at his best has c before and the other to follow.
profusion of thought and brilliancy of suggestion with whiclHegel cannot compare. But soon the reader finds that he is an untrustworthy guide impatient, incoherent, credulous, with no sterling judgment of art, and with a constant bias to the sentimental and the superstitious. Hegel is persevering, laborious, consistent, remarkable for his healthy and masculine judgment of art, while sympathetic and even passionate below the surface. He detests rhetoric, to which Schelling was prone, and the reader feels that fail as he may, he is always making a genuine effort to grasp the essence and get to the heart of his subject. Considering the close early connection between the two great thinkers, and the immense range of recent material of which they shared the inheritance, it may be said that while we prefer Hegel to Schelling, this is partly because Schelling is best represented in Hegel. ^^' ^* Hegel's aesthetic system, as represented Hegel. Dialectic In the with substantial fidelity in the lectures on aesthetic,* makes no parade of the dialectic method which constitutes the essential difficulty of his other philosophical works. Questions as to the degree in which the Dialectic controls the construction of the .Esthetic, must be argued not with reference to the structure of the latter, which is tolerably plain, but with reference to the nature of the former, which will never perhaps be thoroughly agreed upon. Therefore the Dialectic as such does not concern us here, and I propose to spare my readers almost all enquiry into it, only saying enough to explain my own conviction that in the aesthetic we possess a specimen of the reasonable connection which the
;
^ This work on Esthetic was published in 1835, having been put into shape after Hegel's death out of materials consisting of Hegel's MSS. of the lectures, in which the introductions were for the most part fully written out, and of the notes taken by pupils, several sets of which were collected for the purpose. The work is substantively reliable, but must not be regarded as a literary production from Hegel's hand.
THE DIALECTIC.
dialectic
335
was intended to emphasise, without the constant parade of unfamiliar terms which have been thought to be
mere lurking-places of fallacy. The evolution of beauty, as Hegel describes it, depends on a principle analogous to that which Schelling appealed to in a far more artificial form. In
every process of change construed according to the postulate of causation, that which ceases to exist must be supposed so to cease because its nature is no longer adequate to the claim made upon it by the connected system within which it has its being. In a formal and technical sense, therefore, it may be contended that in every causal process, any element which ceases to be, must necessarily be replaced by something more adequate than itself to the requirements of the process as a But such a deduction would be purely formal, because whole. it is possible that the elements of the causal connection might be of a limiting or destructive character, and the reason for the better adaptation of the succeeding element to these demands might lie in its possessing not a larger but a scantier content. To conditions which forbid life, a corpse is better adapted than a living man. But within any evolution which has in fact a progressive character the formal principle just Any vanishing element, indicated will have a real bearing. in being replaced by something which better harmonises with
the systematic and causal process as a whole, is giving way before necessities which in part its own activity has modified Thus, for into a form in which it can no longer meet them. instance, physical decay is not the only reason why a man's Plato's successor must be not life-work ends when he is old. Plato but Aristotle, and granting that adaptability is a matter of degree, still, considering life as a system of phases which determine each other, it seems clear that Plato cûld not become Aristotle by a mere prolongation of his days. The succeeding factor, which meets the new necessities that mould it, is by the very condition of its existence carrying on the lifework of its predecessor in a more complex form, weighted alike with what it achieved, and with what it died in failing to If we are pleased to express these relations by sayachieve. ing that every positive existence, in a progressive evolution, passes over into its negation, which then necessarily makes way for a further positive result, including both the earlier positive and its negative, the phraseology is technical but not And if we are asked how a I think altogether unintelligible.
336
bare negation can enter into the d'ritermination of any positive result, we might point to the possibility that Hegel may have been aware that within a concrete and causal process there is no such thing as a bare negation. However this may be, we have only to master the conception of a necessary progressive movement so far as will enable us to follow the structure of the Êsthetic. For this purpose one more point is necessary to be noted. The successor inherits a task modified by his predecessor, but yet the same, in the sense of bearing the same relation to the causal system which surrounds them both. And therefore there is a certain truth in the quaint terminology of Schelling, which treats the successive phases of evolution in any particular direction as " powers," or specialised intensifications, produced by the reiterated application of an identical process to results generated by itself. I will now attempt a brief account of the most interesting features of Hegel's aesthetic system, relying on the abstract, in great part probably from his own hand, which is printed in the Appendix, for a complete conspectus of it, which would otherwise have occupied the whole of my space in the text as essential to understanding the relation of the parts to each other. iiBeauty is the Idea as it shows itself to Theconcoption of Beauty, sense.^ The Idea, we must remember, does not imply consciousness, although both life and consciousness are reckoned among the forms of its manifestation. But the Idea as such is the concrete world-process considered as a systematic unity. As its "show" or "semblance" (Schein) the beautiful is at once distinguished from the true,^ which is the Idea as it is for thought, and therefore has an identical substance with that of beauty but a different form. It is also, as by Kant, distinguished from the good, useful, and pleasant, all of which have to do with will or desire. As belonging neither to theory nor to Desire, the Beautiful
said to be " infinite," that is to say, free from relativity, whether according to the law of sufficient reason, or according to the alien purposes imposed by desire on its object. The
is
infinite in this peculiar
sense
is
the self-contained or the
self-
which satisfies the perception and does not refer it away through a series of causes or purposes lying outside itself. If endless infinity may be compared to an
complete
;
that
^.sth.,
I.
141.
/^.
ORGANIC DEVELOPMENT.
infinite straight line,
tiful
is
337
of which the beauto a circle or a
Hegel's true
infinity,
a leading example,
may be compared
sphere,
is thus nothing "abstract" in Hegel's "idea," which the very concrete itself, nor any unreality in his "ideal," which is, as we shall see, the idea as manifested in the chief historical types or phases of art. . But the " first " (simplest or lowest) existence The Beauty of Nature. gf jê Idea is in Nature, and the " first " beauty is the beauty of nature.* The beauty of nature, of course, exists only for the perceiving consciousness,^ but Hegel devotes to it a brief separate treatment as differing from the beauty of art in not having been consciously produced with a view to aesthetic effect. He is pardy influenced by the idea of nature as contrasted with man, and only includes man in his account of natural beauty as an afterthought,' and in some degree as a contrast to the beauty of animals. The difficulty, however, in the separate treatment of natural and artistic beauty, at once makes itself felt in the fact that landscape scenery, which is dealt with in a few words under this former head, is more fully spoken of when the art of painting comes to be discussed. The beauty of nature, as distinguished from man, which Hegel begins by considering, was something that he did not fully feel. He understood that inanimate nature may be in apparent sympathy with human moods, but he had no detailed justification to offer for their coincidence, nor any sense of character and import in mountain form or cloud formation or water movement. His gaze is concentrated on the individual organism and its progressive manifestation of life, in which for the first time the idea seems to him to attain a partially adequate self-revelation, and he devotes more attention to the plant than to the rocks, more to the animal than to the plant, and subsequently more to the human being than to the animal. do not feel, I believe, this exact progression of aesthetic value in the ratio of organic development. The landscape, and plant life as the vesture of the earth, seem to us more yielding and sympathetic to our moods than the concentrated and great as is the beauty of the life of the individual animal
There
is
We
Esthetic,
I.
148.
* Id.,
157.
cf. pp.
167 and 184.

z
338
horse or the tiger, they do not appear readily or continuously They are not, like in our higher enjoyment of the beautiful. man, spiritual in themselves but yet they are sufficiently individual to resist subordination to our general aesthetic sentiments. But in exalting the beauty of the human form as the sole adequate incarnation of the idea, Hegel is in harmony with the best feeling and criticism of to-day, in spite of the immense recent extension of our sympathy with inanimate
;
nature.
His discussion of beauty and ugliness in the forms of animals,^ is half-hearted, and seems to admit that ugliness may be relative. Creatures seem ugly to us, he says, whose forms are typical of qualities opposed to vitality in general, or to what we have learnt to regard as their own special or Thus the sloth as wanttypical form of animate existence. ing in vitality, and the platypus as seeming to combine irreconcilable types, and crocodiles and many kinds of insects, simply, it would appear, because we are not accustomed to
consider their forms as adequate expressions of life, are all regarded as ugly. This implies that below the level of man and art there is no absolute ugliness, a view to which I shall
have to
recur.
But further, as the vitality of nature even in animals falls short of characteristic individuality, the expression of the idea must also be looked for in formal and abstract attributes,^ pervading all nature, and representing to sense a unity that does not amount to the This exter,nal beauty shows itself as the unity of soul life. beauty of abstract form and as the abstract unity of sensuous matter. Under the former head it includes those geometrical embodiments of unity which I have especially drawn attenHegel enumerates them as regution to in antique theory. (of mere repetition), symmetry (of repetition with a larity difference), lawfulness (a far-reaching conception, applying to all totalities in which a number of differences are bound together by a common law, and not merely as repetitions of one another parabolic curves, Hogarth's line of beauty, the different lines of the human arm in two opposite contours, are given as examples) and harmony (the same relation between chiefly qualitative attributes as lawfulness between chiefly
Beauty of
Abstract Form,
: ;
P. 166.
169
flf.
POSITION OF ABSTRACT BEAUTY.
339
quantitative attributes, quantity and quality passing into one another at this point, The relations of colour are given as an example. The beauty still consists in the principle of totality, presented through the suggestion of an agreement in qualities that differ).
Beauty In
"^"'^ '" addition to this scale of principles
he
abstract unity of sensuous senaîfat'riaL matter what appeared by their side in Plato, the effect of purity or simplicity in the sensuous medium, such as colour, tone, or even shape. Here, in passing, he refers to sympathy with landscape scenery as explicable in some cases by this principle, as when we are pleased at the clear sky, or the bright sea. But as a rule, even in the account of abstract beauty, his eye has been on individual formations, on crystals, plants, and animals. As regards this sensuous
^"^P^'^sises
as
the
discussed in connection with Plato and with only to note that Hegel attempts to distinguish, as is right, between purity for sense- perception (freedom from sheer disturbance, as from dirt in colour, and from noise in tone) and simplicity of physical origin. This -latter he mistakenly believes also to condition a peculiar kind of sense-impression, and he unluckily instances violet as a colour which is not in itself simple or one of the essential species of colour ^ Now since natural beauty, no less than that of art, admittedly exists only for perception, we may regard the whole region of the beautiful as forming for Hegel, in spite of the contrast between nature and art, a continuous and ascending scale so that this abstract beauty becomes, as we have throughout considered it to be, a set of general conditions imposed by the formal principle of unity in variety on all sensuous expression qu& expressive, but not exhausting the content even of a curve or colour, much less of any more individual presentation. But purely natural beauty the beauty of things as common perception sees them is essentially defective,* owing to its incapacity, even granting that the actual human form belongs to it, for representing the unity of a spiritual being at every point of the sensuous shape. In a striking passage Hegel explains how nearly the human form, in contrast to
purity,
Kant,
which we we have
Violet
is
a primary colour.
i.
180.
340
that of animals, fulfils this requirement,' by the hue and sensitiveness of the skin, its peculiar appearance of life, and so on. But even the human body is overlaid with the mark-
ings of nature and accident, and in modern times by a dress which resists expression and all this hinders the spiritual life from perfectly shining through its form. It is therefore necessary that the idea, which Beauty of Art; fithe Ideal jj^g found the fullest non-sensuous expression of itself in the human intelligence, should proceed as it were to repeat consciously the process by which it was unconsciously
;
in nature, and construct for itself a more adequate representation equally actual for sense in the second nature of art. Now the entire subjective aspect of this process, the matter which is imagined in forms capable of representation, constitutes, according to Hegel, the Ideal, that is to say, the Idea so translated into the terms or tendencies of imagination as to be capable of direct or indirect presentation to sense. Concreteness is the bridge to artistic realisa-
embodied
tion.^
(i) The relation of the Ideal to Nature, with reference to imitation and so-called idealisation is simply and sufficiently stated by Hegel. imitauon. Simple imitation he does not wholly despise, but, following the track of Aristotle, refers our pleasure in it to our " satisfaction in mental production." This satisfaction he is inclined to defend, as the just pride of the mind in being able to do with a simple material of its own choice, ' the essence of what nature can only do with enormous and varied real resources. It may be regarded either as an exaltation of the thing imitated into the medium of mind, or even as an irony directed against mere sensuous reality. Objects thus imitated delight us, he says, not because they are so natural, but because they are made so natural. * This is a profound judgment, indulgent with the indulgence of a great mind for to a philosopher enthusiastic for the highest conceptions of art, nothing could be more repulsive than the reduction of it The ultimate defect of pure to sleight-of-hand in imitation.* imitation is, then, that it is formal, regardless of the individual matter or meaning of what it represents.
Nature and the
Ideal.
;
P. 184.
* Cf.
"^
See Appendix
I.
See
*
p. iz, supra.
Introd. E. Tr., p. 82.
ibid.
ALL IDEALISATION SELECTS.
34
ideausatton. In seizing this matter or meaning, and impressing a universal character on the perceptible imagery of representation, we have the second stage and true essence of fine art ^ poetry as opposed to making. However concrete and particular may be the forms of art, they must be different for having passed through the mind, which is the faculty of universal. If the artist imitates nature, it is not because she has done this or that, but because she has done it right} Nature, in short, "is an empty indefinite phrase.* Poetry [as the general spirit of art] will always be obliged to insist upon the energetic, essential, distinctive, and the ideal is this expressive essence, not the merely actual, to represent whose details in any scene e.g. in a scene of every-day life, would be languid, spiritless, wearisome, and intolerable." It is plain to an observer of to-day that the two opposite senses of idealisation, in respect of which Hegel's masculine feeling sympathised strongly with Herr v. Rumohr's attack on the so-called followers of Winckelmann in his cultus of the ideal, * are ultimately bound up with the two opposite senses of the universal in logic. If the universal is the empty abstract, and its symbol is width of area, idealisation means superficiality and loss of individual content. If the universal is the full concrete, and its symbol is a centre with radii, idealisation means profound insight and wealth of individual Hegel uses the latter notion in aesthetic, as characterisation. he introduced it into logic. The two modes have in common, however, the physical limitations of art and its appeal to perception under definite conditions in both, therefore, there is a certain selection and omission, which facilitates the too ready confusion between them. Behind this view of imitation and idealisation IdeallBatlon ^r i ^ c ^ Absolute or Keia- as Stages of the penetration 01 nature by the "'^ mind, there may be raised a further and more speculative question, namely, " Is the superiority of art to nature absolute or relative " i.e. is the idealisation necessary
;
11
"i
i.
206.
* Ibid.
i.
210.
" Out of this recognition (of the Greek ideal by Winckelmann) there arose a yearning for idealistic representation, in which people thought they had found beauty, but really fell into insipidity, unvitality, and characterless How Schasler could say (i. 386) that Hegel's superficiality." /Esth., i. 202. Esthetic contained only one short remark on Winckelmann passes my comprehension.
*
342
merely for the limitedness of our perception and the physical conditions of representation, or does it put into nature more than the greatest artist could see to be really there if his knowledge were unlimited, and the picture frame unnecessary ? Hegel is more neutral on this point in the Êsthetic than might be expected from his philosophy of nature, in which he seems to treat the natural as contingent. In the Esthetic he speaks of the uniform, direct and solidly coherent sequences
of nature as a corrective of arbitrary conventionalism in art,^ and treats the question whether art or nature is the more beautiful in mere form as empirical, and not to be settled by theory.^ I do not believe that he ever thought of Nature as contingent in the sense of being uncaused or outside the reign of law. Its contingency probably meant for him its apparent indifference to human purposes. He undoubtedly thought, however, that the Ideal ( = the beauty of art) had undergone an actual change by passing through the human mind, and was charged with something more than the deepest insight could find in nature, including man as he is in the prose life of every day. probably still assent to this judgment, but with considerable deductions arising from our new sympathy with the reason displayed in the inanimate world. The art of music, it must be remembered, at once breaks down any attempt to say in general theory that the real world of art in no way transcends that of external existence. Subject to the reservation which has been indicated, and which is practically represented by the life-work of Ruskin, Hegel's treatment of the Ideal is the greatest single step that has ever been made in aesthetic. Winckelmann had portrayed the Ideal as in its perfection one and abstract. Kant, while recognising it as an embodiment of life, had on this very ground excluded it from aesthetic, because relative It was Hegel who while maintaining its aesthetic to the will. nobility in the sense of Winckelmann, and crediting it with the full aesthetic purity demanded but denied to it by Kant, at the same time accepted the extension and differentiations of it so as to constitute the principle and matter of art in all its phases and limits. As an illustration of the mode in which even the commonest nature may enter into the Ideal or the beauty of art, Hegel in this discussion of its relation to
We
Introd. E. Tr., 87.
i.
217.
DUTCH PAINTING.
nature
343
briefly anticipates the eloquent defence of Dutch and paintings, which forms the conclusion of the special section on painting in the third volume. The Weal In life (2) It was natural considering the novelty of ana Action, ^.j^^ attempt to break down the wall of abstraction round the Ideal, that Hegel should devote nearly one-eighth
German
its shorter form given in the discussion of the an excellent illustration of Hegel's critico-historical treatment, and of the range and depth of the ideal as he conceived it. Serious objections are now taken against the Dutch school in particular both on general grounds and with reference to their colouring. (Ruskin, A. F., 5. 24.) 1 have not the special knowledge which would entitle me to offer an opinion on this latter head, and Hegel's apology only deals with their range of subject, and with the spirit in which they approached it. " [The Dutch genre-paintings] ought not simply to be thrown aside under the title of common (mean) nature. If we look close at the real content of
subjoin this defence in

it is
Ideal, because
it is not so common as is generally thought. "The Dutch chose the content of their representations from the present of their own life, and they are not to be censured for having realised this present over again in the medium of art. What is brought before the eyes and heart
these pictures
'
'
of the living world must be something that belongs to it, if it is to claim its interest to the full. To know what interested the Dutch at that time we must ask their history. The Dutchman had to a great extent created the very soil on which he lived and worked, and was compelled continually to defend and preserve it against the onset of the sea ; townsmen and peasants alike, by spirit, endurance, and bravery had cast off the Spanish dominion under Philip II., son of Charles V., that mighty prince of this world, and along with political liberty had conquered for themselves freedom of religion, and that in the religion of the free. It is this civic spirit and enterprise in small things as in great, in their own country and on the high seas, their frugal, yet neat and cleanly housewifery, and the pride and pleasure of the selt-consciousness that they owe it all to their own activity it is all this that constitutes the general substance of their pictures. This is not a low matter and argument, to be regarded with the patrician insolence of " good society " from the vantage-ground of courts and their manners. It is this intelligent cheerfulness in a well-earned enjoyment, which pervades even the animal pieces, and shows itself as pleasure and physical satisfaction, and it is this fresh and wakeful freedom and vitality of mind in apprehension and presenAfter comparing with tation that forms the highest aspect of these pictures." them as of the same general species, some beggar children of Murillo, as "contented and happy almost like the Olympian gods . . . human beings harmoniously created, with no vexation or discontent in them," he ends by observing that such genre pictures ought to be of small size, so as to pass for something trivial. They would be intolerable if they made the claim upon us of being represented in life size. " This," he concludes, referring to the whole passage, " is how ' common ' Nature must be felt, in order to be fit /Esth., i. 212. for art."
344
^
of his entire set of lectures

not,
life,
what shapes
but,
it
must assume
to the perfectly general question, in entering into concrete
It is in this discuscan enter into life at all. sion that he points to a heroic past as the best ground for the art of individual character, being evidently impressed by the conflict of individual courage with orderly civilisation depicted in different relations in Gotz v. Berlichingen, Don Quixote and the R'duber. In a civilised social order, for example, the punishment^ of crime no longer depends on individual heroism it is not even a single action, but is broken up into parts played by separate agents ^police, judge and jury, gaoler or executioner. Thus the great moral powers of society no longer reside in the breast of particular persons but in the co-operation of millions, and the latter relation is more difficult of portrayal than the former. This view coheres with the whole conception of art as, in its evolution, tending to pass out of the most strictly artistic region, and as not possessing in modern civilisation the same sole supremacy that it claimed in the Periclean age, or in the first flush of the Renascence. Whatever we may think of the future of fine art, the facts which favour such a conception are patent and undeniable and, if disputed, it must be so disputed as to allow these facts their due weight.* The whole of this part of the work, constituting as it were a complete analysis of action in general into the elements of its necessary context the spirit of the age, the situation, the collision of duties, the motive, the character is directed to showing how " ideality " can be maintained in the treatment of the most detailed complications and serious aspects of life while the false " ideal," the fancy of a golden age or idyllic existence,* fails of true ideality by the very withdrawal from vigorous concreteness which was meant to constitute its beauty. In Hei'mann and Dorothea, it is pointed out, Goethe avoids this weakness with marvellous skill, by setting
it
;
how
i193-365232. " However excellent we think the statues of the Greek gods, however nobly and perfectly God the Father and Christ and Mary may be portrayed, it makes no difference, our knees no longer bend." He has just said that we may hope for the continual progress of art, only its form has ceased to meet the supreme need of our age. It is untrue that he thinks art to be " played out." * i. 325. He is speaking primarily of Gessner.
i.
**
lb.
ART-FORMS AND ARTS.
345
the domestic story against the dark background of the revolutionary war. Before leaving this part of the system it is well to notice that the section on Abstract Externality ^ as an element in the expression of the Ideal is almost a reproduction of the section on " the external beauty of abstract Form " ^ as an element in the expressiveness of nature. The editors are probably responsible for the repetition, but Hegel must have treated the subject in both places on different occasions. The untenableness of a working distinction between the beauty of Nature and that of Art could not be more strikingly illustrated.
(3) After this general discussion about the relation of the Ideal to particulars, the actual self-particularisation of the Ideal is represented as a process,
EToiutionof theideax
according to the simple dialectic indicated above ;' and this process is the framework of the entire system. It will be seen from the extract printed in the Appendix that in the first place the whole world of imagined beauty or concrete fancy, which is called the " ideal," is conceived as passing through phases determined by the progression of intelligence and also by the cumulative result of the sequence itself And in the second place, the human mind being at all time a many-sided whole, the same needs of expression which thus separate themselves each into its own successive phase in time, also appear, as a co-existing group of modes of fancy, relative to different media of expression, within each of the great historical forms or stages of the " ideal " or art-consciousness.
The former set of successive phases are what Hegel calls the three forms of art, symbolic, classical, and romantic, and taken together make up the main outline of the historical evolution of the ideal. The latter group of co-existing modes of expression, a ^roup which repeats itself within each of the historical artforms, is the system of the several arts, primarily differentiated from each other by the sensuous vehicles which they respectively employ. Therefore the whole set of particular arts. Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music, and Poetry, recurs within each -of the three progressive Art-Forms, the Symbolic, the Classical,
1
i.
325.
i.
169.
3 P.
335.
346
and the Romantic.
And
the
same needs of expression being
at the root of both differentiations of the ideal, the successive and the simultaneous, it follows that though all the arts recur
in each epoch, yet in each recurrence one or more of them have a prerogative rank, depending on the coincidence of their special tendency with the spirit of the age within which
they then are. Thus for the symbolic art-form architecture is central or and for for the classical art-form, sculpture characteristic g;reater mothe romantic art-form, in conformity with its bility and variety, the three remaining arts, painting, music, and poetry, are characteristic, but music above all is the central romantic art. ^ The dialectic continuity which underlies the progression of these historical forms of art may be simply expressed as start with man's universal need to set the seal follows. of his inner being on the world without, in order to recognise himself therein. ^ The first gropings of the mind after sensuous The symbouc Art-form. expression are like dreams, often like nightmares the spirit of man is not yet fully awake, and lays its halfformed fancies arbitrarily in the objects of sense.* This is in Hegel's language symbolic art, not in the wide sense in which all art appeals to natural symbolism,* but in the narrow sense
We
opposed to an embodiment or reprearbitrary and irrational, a search for adequate expression, because nothing is yet formed which is. adequate to be expressed. But the half-formed is on the way to the fully The Classical Art-form. formed. The awakening mind reacts against its nightmares^ by realising its own nature as a compact and definite self in a compact and definite world of relations, and
in
which a symbol
is
sentation.
Here
all is
seizes for the representation of its definite reasonable unity
2 * *
5
See See See See
extract in Appendix,
on Music.
Introd. to ^sth., E. Tr., 59. Ruskin on Indian Art. Aratra Pentelici, 226,
and Two Paths,
11.
Kant on the Symbol, above.

profound
is this
How
up
view
we
are
now
learning
all
year, as
it
we
trace the long preparation in
which the Greek

form.
needed from Oriental sources, only to put

like Ethert
more thoroughly year by spirit learned what monstrosity under its feet, and
rise
Brand, in the
fairest
human
KEGELS SOURCES.
the natural and adequate symbol furnished by the
figure.
The Romantic
Art-form.
34/
human
In the world- movement, however, the compact no enduring phase. The little Greek sphere of fixed natural relations is torn asunder by the great historical forces operative both within and without it, and the idea, assuming the form of a progressive antithesis, in which the Greek past is itself a factor, can no longer be adequately represented in a compact and simple shape, but demands embodiment, if not actually in thought, then in some medium of sense as nearly as possible approximating to thought. At this point we may recall the sources of the conception The combination of these three stages with the before us. three sets of particular fine arts suggests a connection with Schelling's "powers"; that is to say, the process which generated the three successive forms of art is again represented within each one of them by the division into particular The distinction again between " classical " and fine arts. "romantic," which is essentially that between the simple or fixed and the divided or moving, is drawn in material from the historical contrast with which we dealt at length in the " Data of modern aesthetic," and in form from Schelling's antithesis of " Natural " and " Historical," itself derived from The whole notion of a Schiller's Naive and Sentimental. concrete idea as the reality, is referred, we must bear in mind The direction assigned to throughout, by Hegel to Schiller. the movement from classical to romantic makes explicit, as Schelling himself does not, the notion latent in his " real and "ideal" series of arts. The addition of the symbolic art-form as a pre-classical stage is a reflex, materially, of the interest excited by the Schlegels and other Romanticists in Oriental poetry and antiquities, and thus the parallel drawn by Hegel between the Symbolic and the Romantic tendency corresponds to the fact that the same anti-classical contrast The and rebellion brought the data of both into notice. Symbolic appears to be a special application technical term of the idea of symbol or allegory, the former being extended to the whole of art by Solger, and the latter by Fr. v. Schlegel.^ " classical " which It is needless to say that the notion of the
a,nd definite self is
*
i.
392,
cf.
Zimm., A.,
i.
698.
348
forms the centre of the whole evolution is in the spirit of Winckelmann and draws its sterling soundness from Hegel's And finally, intense sympathy with him and with his subject. exceedingly suggestive treatment of the Ideal, not as an the exclusive phase of Art, but as the whole range of fancy that is reacted on and specialised into concreteness by the general demands of expression in each age, and further by the particular sensuous vehicles which determine the powers of the several fine arts, is probably, I submit, due to Schelling's idea For this mythology of mythology as a sine qua non for art. essentially meant the organised province of imagination applicThe modern, able to a particular range of artistic production. make his mythoas we know, had, according to Schelling, to logy for himself out of the material given to the intelligence This concrete aspect of the imagination in itself of his age. and apart from the actual work of production, has never, so far as I am aware, been duly noted by professional art-philosophers except in a degree by Schelling and Hegel, and in one That not only the particular region by writers on music. musician imagines in tones, and the poet in ideas, but the sculptor in marble,^ the ironworker in iron, the wood-carver this is the vital principle in wood, and the painter in colour which lies at the root of the due classification of the arts, and is thoroughly comprehended in Hegel's " ideal." " This highly trained skill in the thoroughly perfect manipulation of the material is involved in the notion of the Ideal, as it has for its principle the total incorporation in the sensuous and the fusion of the inward spirit with the outward being." ^ The demands of execution are subsequently and separately treated, so that we must clearly grasp that Hegel is here speaking of the artistic imagination gud imagination only, and requires even so that it should be moulded, so to speak, by habitual intercourse with its material. Thus the differentia-
tion of the ideal leads
up
to the classification of the arts.
^ That is, of course, in ideas of form, but in ideas of form suggested, moulded, and modified by the habitual feeling of what it is to express oneself in marble. The modem sculptor, it would seem, thinks in clay See CoUingwood, Ruskin's Art Teaching, 281, and Hegel quoting Winckelmann, A.,
!
442. Hegel, ib. The strictures on working in clay only, for marble statues, follow this passage.
ii.
THE DOUBLE
ciassiftcation of the Arts,
CLASSIFICATION.
349
(4) Hegel's classification of the arts is briefly explained by himself in the abstract printed in the Appendix. It is only necessary here to comment on three distinctive points concerning it. a. If the combination on which it rests was The DouWa Basis of ciaaaifioation. thoroughly Carried out, each separate art would be treated in three forms, symbolic, classical, and romantic, just as each of these three art-forms would be pursued through the peculiarities of the five different arts. Thus the classification is founded upon a combined historical and analytic principle, which is supposed by Hegel to represent the same differentiation, both in succession, and in co-existences repeated within phases of the succession. The culminating point of the group of particular fine arts at any period is thus to be found in that branch of art which corresponds within the coexistent system to the then dominant phase of the succession. Architecture, the art of incomplete symbolism, is the climax of preclassical or merely symbolic art sculpture, the art of complete and compact though limited expressiveness, is the climax of classical or self-complete and balanced artistic production of the Greek age, and so on. The recent historians of aesthetic agree in condemning Schasler ^ thinks that it this double principle of classification. contradicts itself in treating a single art under more than one form, although he sees that the empirical facts give some Hartmann* considers that the support to such a method. confusion between the division of forms of style (!) and the division of the particular arts is fatal to Hegel's whole system, and especially he complains that the " confusion " recurs withZimmerin the treatment of each separate branch of art. mann * makes similar criticisims on the intermixture of historical and philosophical principles, and on the feature of recurrence, and, in addition, can find no distinction between the symbolic and the romantic, and infers that both of these, being inadequate in form to their import, must fall outside beauty. From Zimmermann, an able writer of the Herbartian school, and a pure formalist in aesthetic, no other criticism could be He thinks that history should be severed from expected. philosophy as absolutely as the story of Newton's apple from " The conception of symbolism would astronomical theory.
;
982.
i.
536.
i.
709
ff-
350
exist
if
there had never been a work of art bearing that charnor a period, nor a people devoted to it." ^ This is indeed the high priori road. The conception of linguistic or algebraical symbolism would no doubt have existed if onlylanguage and algebra had existed and fine art had never been heard of. But whether out of these essentially different species of the genus the conception of aesthetic symbolism would have been generated, if no aesthetic sensibility had ever been observed, I must take leave to doubt. The whole nature of the philosophical sciences is here at issue. When on the other hand Schasler and Hartmann, both of them in name objective idealists, take a similar view of a German thinker, a foreigner hesitates to express an opposite opinion. It will be simplest to attach the observations which appear necessary to a short recapitulation of the empirical facts which suggested and support the treatment in question.
acter,
independent of history as the exact sciences. Philosophy is essentially concrete and though its principles are bound to be clear, its logical sequences coherent, and its distinctions objective, yet even in Logic, the abstraction of abstractions, it is wholly impossible to motive and correlate the phenomena without referring to their empirical context in the more and less developed language and intelligence of peoples. Yet in Logic we are dealing on the whole with a system of which the parts, the individual sciences, are able to co-exist in their highest form and vitality. In aesthetic this is not so, and in spite of the unity of art all evidence points to the conclusion that it cannot possibly be so. Architecture was the most important art of the pre-classical period and extra-classical world, though in this world and period we do not find the culmination of architecture. This is all that the theory absolutely requires but the other arts comply with it less grudgingly. Sculpture was the pride of Greek art, and in Greek art we find the greatest achievements of pure sculpture. For us, Greek painting and music hardly exist and though this, if a sheer accident, ought not to influence our theories (as it probably has influenced them) yet we know enough to conjecture with likelihood that acquaintance with these productions would not, when brought into compar;
;
Facts that support the
^-
None
of the philosophical sciences are as
Zimmermann,
i.
711.
THE DOUBLE CLASSIFICATION.
35
ison with their modern correlatives, have profoundly modified our ideas of the history of art. Greek poetry is, beyond any doubt, romantic in comparison to Greek sculpture, and plastic or narrowly classical in comparison to modern poetic art. Painting and music, as we know them, practically begin with the modern world, and music in particular attains greatness
after the impulse of formative art, if not wholly exhausted, had lost its centrality and certainty of achievement. Not only are these arts romantic par excellence as compared
with the sculpture and architecture even of modern times, but they attained their culmination, so far as history has yet gone, within the romantic development, and as a whole,* in separate and distinct epochs. With reference to poetry, the universal art, it would indeed be unbecoming to speak of a modern superiority so far as excellence is concerned but in that which separates poetry from the other arts, its profoundness, its freedom, and its spirituality, it cannot be denied that modern poetry is more poetic and less " plastic " than that of Greece. Now in every classification it is well to begin by exactly framing or limiting the matter which we propose to classify, and in view of these facts which show the disparateness of much of our material, this framing is automatically effected with singular felicity by subordinating the analytic distinction Thus of the arts to the historical distinction of the art-forms. when Hegel treats at length of symbolic classical and romantic^ architecture, we understand that these three forms are
;
essential
distinctions
in
architecture,
and that architecture
the "symbolic" species /r excellence in each of these art-forms. It is idle to treat of architecture or sculpture, as Hartmann does, by mere general analysis, avoiding all reference to their characteristic periods the natural peculiarities of the object-matter are neglected, and nine-tenths of the important phenomena are omitted. The relation, for example, of fine architecture to building or engineering on the one hand and to sculpture on the other is thus discussed, wholly
again
is
* Turner was contemporary with Beethoven, but this can hardly break down the statement in the text. For all we yet know, Turner was an isolated genius. At least he is not connected with the first prime of modern art. 2 Hegel's treatment of this is much influenced by Goethe's Deutsche Baukunst. See A., ii. 332.
352
HISTORY OF
îSTilETIC.
without reference to the actual development of architectural decoration in the greatest periods, and to the position of the artist-workman in regard to Greek, and again in regard tc romantic, ornament. The most important issues are consequently either unmentioned or just baldly alluded to.^ The wholly unfree character imputed by Hartmann to architecture and all the minor arts and crafts cuts a troublesome knot conveniently at first sight, but leave the far worse
perplexity behind, that on this view
beautiful
is
some
beautiful art qttd
Nothing but a more appreciative treatment, such as even in a short abstract ^ that of Hegel is seen to be, can combine the truth of Hartmann's idea with that of Ruskin's equally extreme doctrine that architecture is
unfree.
throughout subordinate to sculpture. "^^ ^"' when, leaving the successive art-forms. Principle of Analytic we come to consider the co-existingf system of the arts, a dennite ground of classification is unquestionably necessary. Here, as often happens, the wealth oi Hegel's knowledge and industry has disconcerted his critics and even his followers. At the close of the chapter printed in the Appendix, Hegel mentions two possible abstract principles of classification the sensuous medium, and the relation to space and time. The former might be treated either with reference to the actual material employed, or, as in a fuller passage,' with reference to the effect on the spectator's perception. Schasler * is unable to see why, having mentioned this basis of division, in the latter passage, he at once lets it fall (and we might add, that of space and time also), and recurs to the principle of symbolic classical and romantic as the only one which is really
;
concrete.
These others, it should be noted, may be taken as exhausting the principles in vogue both before and after Hegel. Kant and Schelling had divided the arts of form from the art which makes use of speech, and Hegel observes that this results
Let any reader compare Hartmann's treatment of architecture in vols, ii. of the /Esthetic with the chapter on the " Nature of Gothic " in Ruskin's Stones of Venice ; or with the passages quoted from Wm. Morris, above pp. 95 and 1 24, or with the chapter " Architecture " in Mr. Collingwood's vol. on Ruskin's Art Teaching, or with the discussion in Prof Baldwin Brown's Fine Arts, and then turn to Hegel on "Romantic Architecture," /Esth., ii. 332. ^ See App. I. * 1003. 3 ^,^ ii_ 253.
^
i.
and
A CONCRETE
PRINCIPLE.
353
from the division according to organs of sense, except that music, which Schelling threw in with the arts of form, must be separated as by Kant qua art of sound, while the speaking art is more truly to be reckoned as one whose medium is
imagination. Thus modified, the division is practically that of Hartmann (Arts of the eye. Arts of the ear. Art of the fancy). Lessing, on the other hand, had, we remember, distinguished formative art from poetry (music was not within his horizon) by their relations to space and time, which in the form of rest and motion are the principles of Schasler's division. Now why does Hegel let fall, after mentioning them, both these principles, and recur to the threefold division of art-forms ? Simply because, in motiving this latter division he is able to exhaust the content of both these abstract principles, while, even taken together, they are not sufficient to found a division
upon.
should observe that he employs^ the first, before dropto clear the ground by excluding the non-aesthetic senses of touch, taste, and smell the two latter as dealing with matter in process of dissolution and therefore as destructive if not appetitive in their relation to the object, and the former as in contact only with the pure particular as such, and consequently unable to apprehend a systematic unity in sensuous This is probably the true differentia of non-sesthetic form. senses, and all other non-sesthetic characteristics in them are only of importance as conditions or results of this. The point then of Hegel's concrete principle of division, by which he simply enquires into the powers and conditions of the several arts as human activities producing a certain effect by more or less material means, is this, that by not tying himself down to any abstract principle he is able to let each art stand out free in its full individuality, instead of ranking painting with sculpture against music with poetry, or the like. If, for example we approach the question simply as one of sensuous appear ance to the observer, then we lose all touch of the material which sets his task to the artist but this is the essential difference e.g. between sculpture and painting moreover, all formative arts at least are essentially athletic,^ and through their relation to the artist we obtain an invaluable insight into the nature of expressive self-utterance which later criticism
We
ping
it,
A.,
ii.
253.
Collingwood, p. 242.
A A
354
in England has independently developed. The character of each individual art is thus scrutinised by Hegel with a view
to the coincidence between its expressive capacity as a whole and any content or import which it appears especially fitted to embody. For it is on the balance and reaction between expression and import that the distinction of the art-forms hinges. No parallel series are established. The analogy between architecture and music is simply noted, by the side of other analogies which music presents, as is a somewhat unpromising resemblance between sculpture and epic poetry. The result on the whole is a linear classification, representing the increasing ideality of the arts in terms of all the bases of division which I have mentioned, more gradually and more justly than the real and ideal series of Schelling and many others, and allowing, by the method that has been described, for the enormous difference between the " ideal " art of poetry
arts
Greek and in modern times. The intervals between the may be imagined as equal, for the three romantic arts are allowed full and free individuality within their class-heading, and music in particular is for the first time put in its true place as the art in which pure feeling and necessary structural form the two extremes of the mental world are brought into absolute oneness, so that without any recognisable object
in
or idea the movement of things ^ in as far it interests our feeling is built up into an organic and necessary fabric. It has been said that Hegel's classification is a descending series.* This is not so ; the romantic arts are the culmination of art as such, though it is mere truth to say that they are not the culmination of beauty in the narrower sense. Whether art, in attaining its culmination, does not tend to pass beyond itself, just as in architecture it has not wholly attained its idea, is another question and whatever the future may have in store (which is no subject for philosophy) there is no doubt that the whole ground and content of life, being thoroughly reflective and intellectual, is quite otherwise related to the beautiful today than it was in Greece or in the Middle Ages.* In saying that the art-spirit is essentially in evolution we do not deny that the evolution may be renewed on a higher level than
;
before.
/Esth.,
iii.
145.
ff.
Hartmann,
i.
127,
ii,
A.,
ii.
234
See esp. ysth.,
232.
VALUE OF "NEGATION.
"^*
355
four leading
Conceptions
defined.
^^ ^^
undoubtedly
1
out of i.i_
Hegrel.
Whether as
?i-i
difficult to get a net result Beiner aware of this quality, ** i i think, a merit, or as the reader may-
think, a-defect,
I will attempt before passing on to put together his views on four cardinal points of aesthetic, which, taken in combination, limit, begin, and end his account of the beautiful. Beauty itself, we may hope, has been sufficiently defined in its narrower sense by the classical ideal, in its wider sense by the whole evolution of the art-forms, (i) No systematic treatment is devoted to ugliness. gather from a passage on caricature * that ugliness always involves distortion. This I take to mean the suggestion of a type by a presentation which, in
;
We
suggesting, parodies it. The reference * to natural ugliness confirms this; it appears to be there treated as relative to our habitual judgment of typical character, though this does not exclude the possibility that our judgment may be objective. False characterisation seems then to be the essence
of ugliness.
There is a curious and instructive problem as to whether ugliness proper is present in the imperfect or symbolic phase of the ideal. Here the vicious and uncouth presentation of, say, an Indian idol, has its viciousness duly grounded in that of the content, the conception of Deity, which is to be expressed. For this reason, I presume, Hegel seems to shrink from applying to such forms as these the technical word " ugly " (hasslich), though he describes them as vicious, They are, he says, not beautiful,' but distorted, deformed. attempting to express the absolute in plainly inadequate as form they have a certain analogy to the sublime. The fact is that Hegel's notion of beauty is so positive throughout, that he is not led to devote any special treatment to what, as If we can its negation, falls outside his track of enquiry. exhaust the positive, we can easily infer the place of the
So far his method is far more different kinds of negative. Opposite, instructive than many which are purely schematic. contrary, counter-part, negation, are all of them mere formal terms, and tell us nothing at all unless we know the context and mode of genesis of the opposition or negation in question.
But
if
we know
1
the latter points, the technical terms can be
Introd., E. Tr., 43.
Sujira, p. 338.
i.
427.
356
readily supplied. In Hegel the ugly is, it would seem, the positive negation of a typical content, given as the portrayal of that content, i.e. the analogue of falsehood or confusion of relations. The character of Moliere's miser is called an
ugly (hasslich) abstraction I imagine because it is a partial Rudeness, character alleged as a portrait of a concrete man. austerity, and the grotesque are not ugliness ; the romantic ideal intentionally turns its back on classical beauty without leaving the realm of beauty as such. Common life qua common, in which no great character ^ is perceptible, is the world of prose as contrasted with the general poetic sphere of art, but is not spoken of as ugly. (2) The sublime in the strict sense* lies at the threshold of beauty, and belongs to the " symbolic " art-form. As the basis of his treatment of it Hegel quotes from Kant:' "The strictly sublime can be contained in no sensuous form, but attaches to ideas of reason, which although no adequate representation is possible for them, are yet stirred up and evoked in the mind by this very inadequacy, which can be represented in sensuous form." The sublime in general, Hegel continues, is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation. As a case of inadequate expression it is akin to the ugly or at least to the deformed and monstrous of the symbolic (its remember that to Schiller the same own) phase of art. appearance might be both ugly and sublime. But yet these montrosities have only "an echo of the sublime," because they half satisfy, or are taken to satisfy, the need of expression by the very distortion, or magnitude, barbaric splendour and the
;
We
like (false or endless infinity),
which makes them monstrous
whereas, in the true sublime, a sharp consciousness of inade-
quacy
is
required.
purest type of this consciousness is found in Jewish religious poefry, which contrasts all created things as perishable being,^ with the one abstract God, in the sense that no creature can be supposed in any way to represent Him so that this true sublime cannot take the shape of formative art, but only of poetry. This ascription of sublimity to the relation between the Jewish God and the created world is as old
;
The
i.
190.
i.
455.
K.
d.
U., p. 99.
i.
466.
SUBLIME AND ROMANTIC.

as
357
Longinus, as Hegel points out^ with reference to the example " Let there be light, and there was light." Burke takes an instance from Job and Kant, in a noble passage,"
:
finds the highest type of the sublime in the very prohibition of the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image," comparing it in spirit with the non-sensuous character which he ascribes to the moral law. The Psalms, Hegel continues, give for all time classical specimens of true sublimity, in the exaltation of the feelings which passes over everything else to worship the power of God only. Nothing in the universe, they insist, can claim independence, for everything exists simply by His power and as subservient to Him.
It is instructive to compare this estimate of the Psalms in the work of a great systematic philosopher, with the continual reference to them in Ruskin, who while feeling their sublimity to the full, does not appreciate the entire hostility to the spirit of formative art, nor the temper of separation between God and man, in which they are conceived. " Sublimity," Hegel says at this point, " involves on the side of man the feeling of his own finiteness and his insuperable remoteness from God." The conception of immortality, therefore, cannot exist at this stage. The consciousness of God as law is the germ of a more affirmative relation to him. The sublime, though entering into the symbolic phase of the ideal, is specifically distinct from beauty and the ideal in the narrower or classical sense.* Still more is it incompatible with the romantic art-form in which the absolute is received into the individual subject in the form of love, " the ideal of romantic art" ;' and man himself, at one with God, becomes the expression of the infinite. The depths of import in romantic art, which " turns its back on classical beauty," * make it possible, indeed, to extend the idea of sublimity as other writers have done, through all the more serious expressions of the relation between the individual man and the universe, as for example, through the sphere of religious and Here, however, the question becomes verbal. tragic feeling.
'
134-5. 90th Psalms are those which he quotes, laying " Thou hidest Thy face, they are troubled ; stress on such verses as civ. 29 Thou takest away their breath, they die," etc., and xc. S, 6, 7 Thou earnest them away as with a flood," etc. * ii. 150. 8 ii. 124, 133. * i. 466.
1
i.
i.
468. 471.
K.
d. U.,
The 104th and
358
I
need only point out that Hegel's usage is limited by a clear and historical differentia the sense of inadequate expression while any modern phenomena in which this sense appears to revive, as for the individual in his weakness and particularity it plainly may, are most simply treated as sublime by analogy. The individual, in any stage of culture, includes and may reproduce at times any past phase of human
logical
feeling,
(3) "^^^ tragic is therefore, in Hegel's eyes, As a poetic form it is the outside the sublime. greatest achievement both of classical and of romantic art. It depends, primarily, on the collision of real spiritual forces, such as the family and the state, in individuals whose action has therefore an aspect both of Tightness and of wrongness. And these forces, especially in ancient tragedy, forming the substance of the individual personality, cannot be detached therefrom, and involve, in the issue by which the conflict restores unity to the spiritual world, the destruction of the persons who represent them. This identification of the entire personalities with their substantive aims or rights, is the secret of the unhappy ending which Aristotle thought the better in ancient tragedy. His underlying reason plainly was that the happy ending, which he contemptuously assigns to comedy, involves the abandonment of essential purpose by the persons of the drama. Hegel's short account of the Antigone explains his conception better than any comment.^ "The completest species of this development is possible, when the persons in conflict appear, in respect of their concrete being [individuality, birth, position, etc.], each as including the whole of the sphere concerned. They then, in their own nature, are in the power of that against which they do battle, and injure that, which by the law of their own existence they ought to honour. So, for example, Antigone lives within Kreon's civil authority she herself is a king's daughter, and the betrothed of Hsemon, so that she was bound to pay obedience to the sovereign's command. Yet Kreon, too, who on his side is father and husband, was bound to respect the sanctity of blood-relationship, and not to command what violated that piety. Thus each of them has immanent in him or herself that against which they respectively rebel, and
--.
-,
iri
;
iii-
556
TRAGEDY.
359
they are seized and broken by that very principle which belongs to the sphere of their own being. Antigone suffers death unwed, but Kreon too is punished in his son and in his wife, who seek their own death, the one because of Antigone's end, and the other because of Haemon's. Of all that is noble in the ancient and modern world I know pretty nearly all of it, and it is right and possible to know it the Antigone appears to me, from this point of view, the most excellent, the most satisfying, work of art." In the more subjective solution of the CEdipus at Colonus, Hegel finds a beginning of modernism, though no anticipation of the Christian consciousness, which is not, like the Greek, restored or reconciled within the intelligence, but rather dis-
owns altogether its earthly being. In modern tragedy, then, the depth and interest of individuality and the formal maintenance of its consistency, in some degree take the place of the single moral right and duty constituting the whole personality. The surrounding circumstances are admitted in all their variety and contingency, and there is therefore a difficulty in keeping the necessary connection between the character and In the Shakespearian drama the the issues of the plot. character is made to work itself out inevitably, exhibiting and But if the accepting in itself the consequences of its action. connection between character and issues is lost, and the story becomes one of pure innocence oppressed by the chances of a hostile world, then the tragic element is destroyed, and the effect is no longer tragic, but an idle or futile melancholy or
horror.*
When
reacts
on the other hand the conflict of aims or interests on the character, in virtue of its subjectivity, so as to
produce a harmonious whole without sacrifice of individual lives, as is the case in a few ancient dramas, e.g. the Philoctetes, then the law of tragedy, which consists in the sacrifice of individuals to principles or aims inseparable from them, is abandoned, and we have the modern "drama of real life,"* which may arise, as Lessing explained, either out of tragedy Shakespeare seems purposely to distinor out of comedy. as tragic by the sacrifice of individual life, guish certain plays but a comedy like Measure for Measure touches all depths of mental suffering. There is a risk in the modem drama of
*
573-
539'
360
the whole development being thrown into the mere character, without a substantive aim to give it continuity, so that the knave is converted, and forgiven, but we are not satisfied, for we are sure that this development is unreal, and that he resubjectivity which sets itself mains a knave in spite of all.^ free from every particular import is in its cycle and degree the dissolution of the beautiful, which lies in the concrete
unity of subject and object.
complete triumph of subjectivity* ^j^g comedy of Aristophanes marks the close of one period, and the comedy of Shakespeare* perhaps that of anThe comic in this pre-eminent sense must be sharply other. Only that is truly comic, distinguished from the laughable. which the persons of the play are comic for themselves as in well as for the spectator, and so escape all seriousness, bitterness or disappointment when their futile purposes are desComedy troyed by the means they take to realise them. starts from the absolute reconciliation which is the close of
Tie
comic
(4)
As
this
tragedy,* the absolute self-certainty and cheerfulness which This is the attribute as of the Aristonothing can disturb. Shakespeare's comic characters, among phanic persons so of whom Falstaff is " the absolute hero " ;^ a sort of greatness runs through them, a freedom and strength of individuality
and superiority to external failure. Serious modern comedy, such as Moliere's Avare, has not this ideal characteristic, and therefore tends finally to pass into the prosaic world of the ordinary drama, the mere ingenious representation of com monplace intrigue. iv. I may conclude in Hegel's words,* from the one uB on. j^^^ ^^^ pages of the Êsthetic lectures " With the development of comedy we have arrived at the began with symbolic close of our scientific discussion. art, in which subjectivity is struggling to find itself a content and form, and to become objective we advanced to classical art, which sets before itself in living individual shape the sub:
We
Cf. e.g. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 576. " Whereas in Tragedy the externally valid comes out victorious, 533. in Comedy, conversely, stripping off the one-sideness of the individual This it is subjectivity which in its infinite security keeps the upper hand." form is drawn from Schelling, who defines Comedy as the converse of Tragedy having " necessity in the subject and not in the object." * iii. 579. * iii. 557. ^ iii. 207. ^ iii. 579-80.
1
iii.
...
CONCLUSION.
56
stantive content which has become distinct and we ended in the romantic art of the heart and the feelings with the absolute subjectivity moving freely in itself in the form of mind, which, satisfied in itself, no longer unites with the objective and particular, but brings into consciousness for itself the negative character of this dissolution in the humour of comedy. Yet in this culmination comedy is leading straight to the dissolution of art in general. The aim of all art is the identity, produced by the mind, in which the eternal and divine, the substantively true, is revealed in real appearance and shape to our external perception, our feelings and our imagination. But if comedy displays this unity only in its self-dissolution, inasmuch as the Absolute, endeavouring to produce itself into reality, sees this realisation destroyed by interests which have obtained freedom in the real world, and are directed only to the subjective and accidental, then the presence and activity of the Absolute no longer appears in positive union with the character and aims of real existence, but exclusively asserts itself in the negative form, that it destroys everything which does not correspond to it and only subjectivity as such displays itself in this dissolution as self-confident and self-secure.^ "In this way we have now, down to the close, arranged every essential principle of beauty and phase of art into a garland of philosophy, the binding of which is among the noblest achieve; ;
ments that science has in its power to fulfil. For in art we have to do with no mere toy of pleasure or of utility, but with the liberation of the mind from the content and forms of the finite, with the presence and union of the Absolute within the sensuous and phenomenal, and with an unfolding of truth which is not exhausted in the evolution of nature, but reveals itself in the world-history, of which it constitutes the most beautiful aspect and the best reward for the hard toil of reality and the tedious labours of knowledge. And therefore it was impossible that our study should consist in any mere criticism of works of art, or suggestions for their production, but it had
1 See above, p. 354 for a discussion of the idea that Hegel believes art to ha finally ended, on which the close of the Introduction is a sufficient commentary. But we must claim extraordinary insight for him, who, still under
of the artthe spell of Schiller and Goethe, described the present exhaustion impulse and the conditions hostile to it in language approaching that of Ruskin or William Morris.
362
HISTORY OF /ESTHETia
no Other aim than to pursue the fundamental idea of the beautiful and of art through all the stages which it traverses in its realisation, and by means of thought to make them certain and intelligible."
CHAPTER
ESTHETIC IN GERMANY.
Need of Exact
Esthetic,
I-
XIII.
SCHOPENHAUER TO STUMPF
It
IS difficult, I
Said in the last chapter, to get

;
Hegel and strictly speaking, in science as science there can be no net result, no conclusion detachable from the inferential process. But yet the historicophilosophical method, which insists on giving us the whole whenever we ask for the minutest part, seems to some minds, and in some hands really is, an evasion of direct issues. The desire for a plain answer to a plain question found representatives in post-Kantian philosophy, whose importance, overshadowed at the time by the very bulk of the Hegelian
a^ j^g|.
result out of
writers,
has effectually asserted

2.
itself
in
the period of re-
action.
inaugurators of this movement were (1776-1841) and Schopenhauer (1788I shall treat of Schopenhauer first, in order to avoid 1860). interposing an account of him between Herbart and the Herc
ope
uer.
The
-^^^.y^^j.^
bartians.
but it must be remembered that the root of mysticism is a love of directness amounting to impatience, and a repugnance to the circuitous approaches of systematic thought. This same characteristic
phers
may seem strange to class with a writer who is prima facie a mystic
It
" exact " philoso;
a defence for the brevity which our treatment will for the exact or formal display from this point onwards thinkers, to whom on the whole Schopenhauer belongs, being indifferent to content and caring chiefly about given form, are able to state their conceptions almost in axiomatic shape, inIn the following stead of developing them historically. chapter, it may also be remarked, it will be possible to deal as briefly with Hegel's principal successors, because in dealing with them the mass of his ideas may be presupposed. ! Schopenhauer is a true post-Kantian both in .<....... kind ot post- his data and In addition to the his theory. Kantian. Q^ggij and English culture of the time, he was
; ,.
may be
363
364
profoundly influenced by the ancient Indian philosophy, which we remember the Romantic teacher, Fr. von Schlegel, did much to bring into prominence.^ The fashionable pessimism and mysticism of cultivated Europe owes its origin in a great measure to Schopenhauer.* As a theorist, Schopenhauer starts from Kant, whose demarcation of aesthetic he accepts in essentials, and whose conception of the thing-in-itself he identified, here following suggestions of Fichte and Schelling,' with an underlying will, as opposed to the "idea" of Hegelianism, which is the unity of the world interpreted on the analogy of the intellect. This will, as the ultimate reality, is incapable of being the object of knowledge and becomes such an object, not in itself, but only in its "objectifications," which are the external types of specific existence, forming a system of grades in the completeness with which they represent the will, and identified by Schopenhauer with the " Platonic ideas." These ultimate typical individualities, for such they are in opposition to the concepts of science, are only known as divined by artistic perception, being self-contained, and satisfactory to the contemplative sense. They are wholly distinct from such notions as consist in relations under the law of sufficient reason, which, forming an endless chain, forbid the mind to rest in them. For our immediate purpose the main interest of Schopen;
hauer's position is its abstractness, which is complementary to the vast historical complexity of Hegelianism. History, for him, is unessential to the idea * only the eternal types which are framed within it are able to represent, for example, the For knowledge of phenomena, the true method idea of man. is that of the "understanding" with its clear relations according to the law of sufficient reason for knowledge of reality, the visions of art. The moving concrete of "reason" seems nonsense to him his "ideas" correspond to the fixity of species in everything he prefers the definite and the permanent. The
; ; ; ;
^ By his work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Ancient Hindus^ 1813, Schopenhauer was personally acquainted with the Orientalist Mayer, and con-
art.
2
stantly refers to Duperron's Latin translation of the Vpanishads, 1801. " Schopenhauer," Encycl. Brit., by W. Wallace.
8
See
See e.g. Amiel's Diary, with its constant reference to Miyi. " Will is the ultimate being." Schelling, quoted by Wallace, art. " SchopenWiil
hauer," Entycl. Brit.

*
and Idea,
vol.
i.
236, E. Tr.
PREFERENCE FOR THE CLASSICAL.
365
evolution of things as we know them is part of the illusion belonging to our mode of knowledge " velle non discitur " the real underlying character of the universe and of each individual is one and unchangeable. He delights in the simple rationality of the Greek temple,^ and cannot appreciate Gothic buildings, approval of which, as he very naively says, would upset all his theories of the aesthetic purpose of archiTheir interest depends, he thinks, on associated tecture. ideas but these have no place in strict aesthetic judgment.* The distinction between classical and romantic poetry means to him that the former deals with natural motives, and the latter with artificial ones,* specially those of the Christian myth, chivalry, and the ridiculous Christo- Germanic woman worship.* shall find this preference for the classical predominate among the " exact " thinkers naturally, as their view is, in sum, a recurrence to classical aesthetic, armed with the methods of modern science. The beauty of the beautiful, for Schopenii. His account of hauer, has two sides; it frees us from the will, sSditlM^mcations. and therefore from the whole apparatus that attends our greatest vice and misfortune, the will to live, from explanation, causation, means and ends, purpose, desire ^ and on the other hand it fills our minds with an " idea," an objectification of the will at a certain grade which we see in, and as the essence of, the merely particular object presented to our aesthetic perception. As everything is in some degree an objectification of the will, everything is in some degree characThere is no further teristic, and in some degree beautiful.* art and nature than that in art the artist difference between lends us his eyes to look through but then his genius can
;
;
movement and
We
Werke, iii. 473 if. (German). This view, which Herbart apparently shares ( W., viii. 12), reveals a tremendous chasm between these early " exact philosophers " and Mr. Ward, who thinks associated ideas one of the most important elements of aesthetic. Article " Psychology," Encycl. Brit. Fechner is with Mr. Ward on this point. See p. 384 below.
1
Werke,
iv.
92.
Schiller's
Hegel considers
insight into the synthesis of sense This contrast of views is typical s Will, etc., i. 270, E. Tr.
*
reverence for woman a distinct proof of his and reason {Êsth., Introd., E Tr. p. 119).
Ik, 271.
366
HISTORY OF
.iESTHETIC.
understand the half-uttered speech of nature,^ and so produce This understanding what she desired to produce, but failed. is possible because of the unity between the will which we Such an underare, and the will which Nature embodies. standing or anticipation is the Ideal. Ugliness appears to be merely defective manifestation * or partial objectification of the will, and so, in agreement with what was said of beauty, would be merely relative. The sublime ist he same as the beautiful, except that it presupposes a hostile relation between the objects contemplated and the individual will, which hostility, being overcome by an effort, gives rise to a spiritual exaltation of the subject in attaining, by this special effort, the pure contemplation of the idea in the
hostile object.^
The arts are arranged rather according to their objectmatter than according to their medium,* but with regard to the determination of the former by the latter, and so very much in the order in which Hegel placed them. The fault of the latter in looking too exclusively to grades of life as a key to the value of the art representing them is paralleled by Schopenhauer. The peculiar position of architecture and music, however, as not representing any individual objects, gives him occasion for a remarkable treatment of both. The aim of architecture, which has no characteristic individual idea to present, must be, he infers, to put before perception the
simplest qualities of matter, gravity, cohesion, rigidity, and the like.^ This is why the Gothic concealment of the relation between burden and support, which the Greek beamarchitecture is supposed to display in its nakedness, is incompatible with the aim which he ascribes to the art. Apart from its peculiar application, this principle of bringing out the qualities of a material is one of great importance, and conspicuous
1 2
Will., etc.,
lb.,
lb.,
i.
287, E. Tr.
289.
260-1. Schopenhauer's ingenious modification and defence of Goethe's colourtheory appears to be in harmony with modern physiological ideas. He interprets Goethe's account of colour as light mixed with darkness, to mean that colour involves a partial activity of the retina (light), and a partial inactivity (dark), and lays down the principle that the retina always tends to a complete activity, the parts of which, if not simultaneous, as in white light, are successive, as in complementary images. See Ueber das Sehen u. d. Farben, Werke, i.
3 *
i.
277, E. Tr.
IMITATIVE MUSIC.
367
by
its absence in almost all other aesthetic philosophers except Hegel. Music, the analogy of which to architecture is very reasonably treated, the enormous difference between the two arts being duly emphasised,^ is placed by itself, outside and above the series of the other arts. It is not like them, " the copy of the ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity they are." * The expression is mystical, as in Schopenhauer's whole conception of the will in the universe but if we treat it as an analogy much may be said in its favour. We saw how strongly both Aristotle and Plato insisted that music was the most adequate or only adequate "imitation of life and character," or " of moral temperament." We may partly justify the extension of the comparison to the will in the universe, by Schopenhauer's clear recognition following Leibnitz, of the brqad basis of modern music in the necessary numerical relations which underlie the region of musical sound,* but the sense of which acts on the musical conscious; ;
ness as the sign only, and not as the thing signified and thus we may fairly bring together Schopenhauer's conception of music as " the quintessence of life and events,* without any likeness to any of them," with the theory of Hanslick as modified by Lotze,* according to which music embodies " the general figures and dynamic element of occurrences," considered as carrying our feelings with them. This notion has a just and important bearing on imitative music in the strict sense, which is criticised, in terms of the theory, as addressing itself to the intermediate conception of things, the phenomenon of the will, and not to the will or underlying reality, or, as we might say, to the spirit of life and occurrence itself. " Such
(imitative) music is entirely to
be rejected."
This judgment
* Schopenhauer comments on the phrase, " frozen music,'' ascribing it to Goethe and not to Schelling. I do not know how the priority stands as
between them. * i. Readers of Browning will be reminded oi Vogler, 353, E. Tr. both by the comparison between music and architecture, and by the direct
AM
assimilation to the will.

* Schopenhauer quotes with approval, " Musica est exercitium arithmetics occultum nescientis se numerare animi," which Schelling had quoted before him, from Leibnitz. Schop., W, i. 331, E. Tr. * i. See App. II. below. 339, E. Tr. 5 G. d. A., 487. 6 World as Will and Idea, 341, E. Tr.
368
repeats that of Plato. to that of Schelling.
The
ment,
is
above
all
general theory is closely analogous as representing pure moveothers the art which strips off the
" Music,
bodily."^
critieismof schopennauer.
iii. Schopenhauer's attitude to concrete Idealism j^^gj ôf j^g judged by his attacks upon Hegel Schelling. His whole doctrine in aesthetic is essentially
and a form of the theory of the characteristic, though always with a leaning to the distinct and plainly rational as against the suggestive and profoundly emotional. Though sense, as he knows quite well, is the organ to which beauty is relative, yet he always speaks of eesthetic perception as a form of knowledge distinguished only by being free from will. This defect reacts on his system by a certain want of sympathy in the treatment of architecture * and tragedy,' the highest function of the latter being necessarily for him negative, to produce resignation. Except for this, and an insertion of landscape gardening after architecture in the series of arts, Schopenhauer
the substance of his views a very fair representative of post- Kantian aesthetic, while in literary form he \s facile princeps among German philosophers. Such a doctrine as Hegel's opposition between true and false infinity is far more easily
is in
approached by the non-philosophical reader through Schopenhauer's contrast between the aesthetic object and the object of theoretical knowledge. But if the main element in his account of music was after all a mystical conception, for a blind will is perhaps even harder to bring together with the unity of the world than an active
unconscious idea, he nevertheless justified at least the place which Hegel assigned to music as the central romantic art, and impressed upon the philosophical and the musical world, in telling language, the problem of its mysterious powers. ^^ îll be remembered that the object of 2>Herbart aesthetic judgment first presented itself to Kant as "form," and that the symbolic or significant nature of this " form" only pressed itself upon him as his inquiries continued, and subject to some doubt wJêther "significance" as such was not extra-aesthetic.
* See above, p. W., v. 501. 365. motives of the Antigone and Philoctetes are " Widerwartige oder gar ekelhafte." W., iii. 43? German).
1
Schelling,
The
ELEMENTARY RELATIONS.
HisFormausm
audita
consequenceB.
369
*" ^^ attachment to the idea of pure form, and agreeing with Schopenhauer in a strong antagon-
j^^^ ^^ ^j^^ historico-philosophic school,
Herbart
took his
of vindicating the objective validity of the cesthetic judgment.^ Like Kant, he considers this judgment essentially individual, on the ground that abstract universality is incompatible with the complete presentation of the form submitted to judgment. And again like Kant, in fact though not in words, he ascribes to this judgment objective validity because of its permanent truth about the same object^ under the same conditions. For modern logic such an "individual"
is
own way
judgment
plainly universal.'
pure form, then, with reference to which objective individual judgments are made, consists, in his view, of relations and nothing but relations, simply as presented, and wholly dissociated from context. These are the "aesthetic elementary relations," and the enumeration of these is the task of aesthetic science. are startled to find that among such
The
We
those of will to will are included, so that ethics becomes a branch of aesthetic. This does not, however, involve confusing the act of will with the aesthetic judgment. The good implies both these conditions the beautiful, only one of them. * The first immediate consequence of this view is a protest against the generalising predicates such as " pathetic, noble, pretty, solemn," and the like, drawn from species of subjective They have emotion, which find a place in common aesthetic. not only the fault of subjectivity, but also that of abstractness. They tell us nothing of the special beauty and ugliness in nothing in music, where the question is of particular arts tone nothing in sculpture, where the question is of contours.* And so Herbart is with some justice hard upon writers like Schelling, who find in every art the excellence of some other, and not its own. The real type of the relations which he desires to discover and enumerate is in the relations of harrnony between musical notes. These, he said in a foot-note
relations
; ; ;
1 2
Zimmermann, ^.,
Logically
i.
773.
Herbart,
is
iV., viii. 27.
"subject"; Herbart
contrasting
it
with the subject as
percipient.
*
*
5
See p. 341 supra, on Idealisation. W., ii. 74.

JV.,
i.
130.
B B
370
which was afterwards modified, perhaps as too rashly candid, were the only aesthetic elements which had for centuries been determined and recognised with almost complete certainty,^ He only aims at simple forms, "elements;" no clear and unambiguous judgment can be passed upon a highly complex work of art or nature. The combination of the elements
belongs to the doctrine of art. The second immediate consequence of his view is that the simple has no aesthetic quality,^ and according to Zimmermann^ he even pushes this conclusion against the beauty of It is so obvious that tones and colours perceived in isolation. (extension in space or time no presentation is really simple sufficing to render it complex) that to decide this vexed question, which has already been touched upon more than once,* on such a ground, seems extraordinarily naive. And there are deeper reasons for questioning the Tightness of the conclusion, even if we take tone and colour as approaching simplicity. Herbart did not carry out systematic researches in aesthetic. It is worth while, however, to take note of some of his most suggestive remarks. His primary division of aesthetic elementary iiXTDlTision His ^ . , i i or relations is that between the simultaneous and ^sthetieEeiations. ^^^ successive but all the arts, he finds, parThe effect of the predominance of succession ticipate in both. on poetry is worked out in a way that reminds us of the But in poetry the simple relations are difficult to Laocoon.* In state owing to the lapse of time between their terms. tones and colours it is easier, and there should be a science of colour harmony like that of harmony in music* An exceedingly instructive example of Herbart's views is given at this point in an answer to the objection, " the importance of which is derived only from its audacity," that the numerical relations which underlie the relation of harmonising tones are not the elements of positive beauty in music, and but for the composer's genius, which gives them soul and significance, might
1 JV., i., 150, note, withdrawn after 3rd edition. Z., i. 770. bass) he considers a part of aesthetic.
General-bass (Thorough-
2 3
^.,
i.
i.
137-
797. * In treating of Plato, Kant,

B IV.,
i.
and Hegel.
See below on Zimmermann.
149-50-
* Id.
This natural idea cannot be pressed.
SYMMETRY.
371
" This soul and significance," he produce mere monotony. replies, " may be great with great artists, and little with little ones in any case we must abstract from it here, for we are speaking of the elements, and of the degree of accuracy with which they are determined. The mind of the artist can make no change in this." In an earlier edition he had written, "Then harmony would have to be banished from aesthetic."^ This conception of aesthetic seems to give up the game, so far as a complete explanation of concrete beauty is concerned. The harmonious in tones and colours depends on "blending before inhibition " * which must mean much the same as the capacity of forming parts in a whole. The account of symmetry gives no special importance to the curves of varying curvature, and even appears to say that the circle ' is a predominant form in flower-contours, which shows very defective Yet there is a profound suggestion in aesthetic observation. the same passage as to the deeper equilibrium which replaces symmetry in the forms of plants and in landscapes, as depending on the balance demanded by perception, at present, Herbart says, inadequately understood. The limited conception of curve-beauty* is characteristic of Herbart'sview, which But yet he is prefers in everything the finite and complete. led to the suggestive remark that if there is a general formula of beauty, it is "to lose something of regularity, in order at once to regain it," " i.e. apparently to suggest the rule by deviations from it an elementary case of progress accompanied
;
by negation. upon the above principles of the simultaneous and successive, but on a distinction which is intended to correspond to that between classical and romantic art, or as Zimmermann subsequently called it, art of complete and of
rest
Classification of the Arts,
iii-
Herbart's classification of the arts does not
incomplete presentation.
Architecture. Sculpture.
1
The arrangement *
Painting.
is
as follows
Landscape Gardening.
'
*
(not
6
W., i. 151 and footnote. "Verschmelzung vor der Hemmung." lb. Can " die Kreisform " be a general term for "curves " ? It may be objected to my criticism that the higher curve-beauty would belong to Symmetry. But I do not find it treated elsewhere in Herbart. W., i. iSSlb., 171.
372
Church Music.
Classical Poetry.
" Entertaining " Music. Romantic Poetry.
supposed to consist of arts that " can be looked at on all sides " (like sculpture), the others keeping in a soft twilight and admitting of no complete critical exploration. The distinction as applied to music has of course met with adverse criticism, appearing to omit, for example, the The root of it is probably to be found orchestral symphony. in the passage on harmony above alluded to, where the footnote goes on to argue that the beauty of " chorales" depends almost entirely on harmony, and therefore, it would follow, is readily deducible from the aesthetic elementary relations conIn commenting on the stituted by the laws of harmony. classification, Herbart seems to imply that only those who wish art to express something will care for the arts of the second group, and that their charm really rests on extra-
The one group
is
sesthetic attractions,
It is no objection to Herbart's theory that proposes to deal at first only with simple cases To analyse what lends itself to analysis is the of beauty. first rule of science, and the importance which he attaches to the numerical and physical basis of harmony is not exaggerreal objection might arise if it were seriously mainated. tained that the beauty of more complex shapes in nature and art could be dealt with as a mere combination of the beauties This would be, for instance, to treat the of elementary forms. human figure as a decorative element. The crux of true aesthetic is to show how the combination of decorative forms in characteristic presentations, by an intensification of the essential character immanent in them from the beginning, subjects them to a central significance which stands to their complex combination as their abstract significance stood to
crtudsm and
Estimate,
iv.
jj
them in isolation. But this objection comes later. Every one must welcome the plain statement of simple problems which concern the point where meaning passes into shape, and the attempt to deal with the pleasantness of perceptive states qua perceptive, as consisting of reactions and combinations having their own psychical effects qua reactions and combinations. Therefore the theory of formalism was practically opportune. On the theory of the theory, so to speak, there is more tobe said.
,,
BEAUTY IN RELATIONS.
373
Prima facie, if we are to start from the given in aesthetic perception, it would seem that we cannot start from relations. Beauty as perceived lies rather in qualities than in relations, and a relation as such can only exist for discursive thought, which is not compatible with eesthetic perception. The point, then, of the very relations into which the formalist analyses the simpler cases of beauty seems to lie not in their satisfactoriness to perception, but in their satisfactoriness to the intellectual craving for explanation. As numerical or geometrical relations, apart from sense-presentation, one is in no way preferable to another. Considered, therefore, as an analysis of the actual perception of beauty, the reduction to relations is the assignment of a very simple import or significance to such perceptions, and there is no reason on the same principle for not going the whole length and finding in them the symbols of character or of moral law, just as much as symbols of numerical or symmetrical relation. And in fact, conformably to what was said of the limitations of classical aesthetic, the recognition of a deeper import makes the actual analysis of expressive elements far more subtle, and therefore more complete within the bounds of formalism, than that which only looks for formal relations. Let any reader compare with Herbart or Zimmermann on symmetry, repetition and curvature, either Hegel's treatment of the same subjects in the section on the beauty of nature, or Ruskin's in the last chapter of Elements of Draw, in^, and he will see the difference between formalism within idealism, which has plenty of room for it, and formalism which Yet Ruskin himself finds pretends to exclude all idealism. make no attempt to explain,^ elements in beauty which he can and it is well that there should be exact analysts who urge us to state or describe these given ultimate elements, and in every case to begin research by definitely enumerating the most direct and tangible cases of the phenomenon to be explored. 4. Zimmermann,* a professor at the university zimmermann. ^^ Prague, who with the Austrian professors went over to the school of Herbart,' has been criticised at a great length and with extreme severity by Hartmann,* and also by
2 8
-*
Elements of Drawing, p. 322, and Mod. P., vol. i. p. 25, and iii. 160 Author of Geschichte d. Aisthetie. 1858. Allgemeine ^sth., 1865. Erdmann, Hist, of Phil., iii. 33, E. Tr. ^sth., i. 269 ff.
ff.
374
Vischer^ in a rejoinder to Zimmermann's attack on Vischer's great work. It would not be diffcult, following the line taken by these critics and indicated in my observations on Herbart, to convict Zimmermann's formalism of abstractness where it is pure, and of inconsistency where it appeals to content. But we shall
find it more profitable to consider what fruitful ideas are represented in Eesthetic by this movement (in which Zimmermann attaches himself so closely to Herbart that, while greatly developed, his thoughts cannot be readily distinguished from those of the latter), which though giving an impression of perversity and eccentricity, may yet be seen to rest on a definite conception that has a solid foundation, ^^ cannot indeed be reasonably maintained. ^Tue Distinctive Nature of in view of the elaborate treatment devoted by such s e c.^ o ma thinker as Hegel to mathematical, chromatic and musical beauty, that idealism as such neglects the plain fact that all beauty exists in and for sense-perception or fancy. But yet it might be urged with truth that there has been, as was admitted in the first chapter of the present work, a solution of continuity at one point of the objective analysis. By what mechanism, or under what particular necessity, do sensuous forms which are highly and harmoniously expressive, give pleasure to the percipient owing to that expressiveness ? The idealist relies mainly on a concrete analysis of what is recognised as beautiful. He does not aspire to legislate, but only to explain. He can show that where, and in as far as, the trained perception is pleased, the presentation which pleases is one that has, as we say, "something in it." He may in proportion to his knowledge and his critical acuteness, pursue his researches into every detail of the sensuous semblance, as for instance into its geometrical properties, and prove that, in comparison with a less beautiful perception, it either reveals a deeper idea, or exhibits its idea more adequately to sense. If, however, we ask how to demonstrate that beauty must be pleasant, his answer will be less ready, for the great idealists have dealt but little with the exact psychology * of ideas in interaction.
^ 2
Kriiische Gdnge, no. 6.

I
at
must not be understood to admit that they have not dealt with psychology I should doubt whether any other writer has approached Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, as a study of the phases of subjectivity.
all.
TENSIONS BETWEEN IDEAS.
375
and rightly, that all self-manifestaweaker phase self-recognition, is naturally pleasant. But he might hardly be able to show by what mechanism pleasure is annexed to the contemplation of a symmetrical pattern, or a harmonious arrangement of colour, or to the hearing of a musical chord. And in popular criticism this difficulty sometimes amounts to a formidable contra" The drawing is incorrect, but full of feeling." diction. " The performance (musical) was inaccurate, but full of fire." In each of these judgments the two predicates are not in pan
idealist will reply,
its
The
tion,
with
materia. content.
The
first
predicate refers to form, the second to
But the quality indicated by the second must be
conveyed to eye or ear through positive form through a definite operation of mechanical means no less than the first.
Through what form is it conveyed ? The popular mind drops the analysis as soon as it presents some difficulty, and consequently commits itself to an absolutely fatal antithesis. I do not say that formalistic aesthetic has very much better success in practice, its cruces arising, as Herbart admitted * and as the critics insist, just where the deeper qualities begin. But it is something that we should be kept in mind of the problem. Now this the formalist, and especially the Herbartian
for us. He begins by pointing out that our ideas there are excited certain pleasures and pains by the mere operation of ideas upon one another in respect of their identity or opposition, and their consequent tendency to reinforce or depress one another. If these relations of pleasure and the reverse can be worked out in any degree of detail so as to coincide with the phenomena of aesthetic pleasantness, the result would be a definition of aesthetic pleasure, not merely de facto as the pleasure of expressive presentations, but de jure as the pleasure produced
formalist, will
do
in the current of
by certain tensions, depressions and excitations arising in the course of ideas, definable without going beyond the course of ideas itself. Zimmermann's attempt to discover the fundamental forms which, in the coexistence of ideas, give rise to pleasure and the reverse, and to apply them to the determination of beauty in nature and in art, is admittedly not as successful as its
^
P. 371 supra.
Z7^
HISTORY OF ASTHETIC.
conception was opportune. But it is desirable to make ourselves acquainted with its general nature. " All turns on the " Together," the " ZusamMeaning of tue " Together." men" in Herbart's phrase which is adopted by Zimmermann. Simple images carry with them an addition (Zusatz) of feeling, but this fuses itself with them and is in its nature unaesthetic, because it hinders the distinct perception of that which rouses the feeling.' The addition which arises when two or more images^ are brought " together" is different in this respect. It is distinguishable from the relation perceived, without being removable from it, and consists in a feeling of pleasure or otherwise which simply is the tension ^ between the parts of the compound image. It, the tension felt as pleasure or otherwise, is therefore the aesthetic judgment, which is thus identical and self-evident. The complex image is not a sum of lifeless parts. It is a psychical group of ideas, whose parts are ideas which are living forces, and their " Together " is vital and active, producing tension and relaxation of them against and among each other. * These inter-relations are therefore essentially active and actual they are not mere mathematical relations and cannot be concentrated into an exponent. ^ Now, of course, what sounds or colours are harmonious or not, is decided by the ear and eye. But for what reason in general anything pleases or displeases, that is, as only forms please or displease, by what kind of forms anything, whatever it be, pleases or displeases, this can be decided neither by the eye, nor by the ear, nor at all by experience, but only by thought For, for this purpose we need the question, what forms, that is, what kind of "together" between the perceptions (whatever they may be perceptions of) are, generally, possible ; and this question we can decide without first considering the specific nature of the content, of the per;
A., 25. desire to avoid interrupting this account with comment, so I simply draw the reader's attention to this absolute opposition of simple and compound. Where the simple is to be found, and how a presentation is to be broken up into definite related parts, seems an ultimate difSculty of the view before us. A., 24.
2 I
* lb., 26.
6
lb., 27.
THE ELEMENTARY FORMS.
377
captions (or "ideas") which are in the "together," as given " The in sound to the ear, and in colour-sensation to the eye. conception of psychical ideas which possess a content ((Quality) and a definite energy {Quantity^ is sufficient for this purpose."^ " Esthetic, as it has to do with those forms only by which every matter pleases or displeases, if only it is homogeneous, i.e. capable of entering into forms at all, is therefore not an empirical but an a priori science." * Thus the science is built up deductively, "iElementary and simple Forms, beginning with the elementary or simple forms of " Together " those which involve two terms only and proceeding to the derivative or complex forms, which involve more terms than two, and can always be analysed into the simple forms.^ Beginning with two terms only, and regarding them according to quantity and quality only (disparate terms being incapable of entering into eesthetic form), he finds that in quantity they can be compared only as more or less intense, and formulates the " pure form of Quantity." " The stronger idea is pleasing compared with the weaker the weaker is unpleasing compared with the stronger." * In Quality the only cases which do not reduce the two terms to one are those of predominant identity and predominant discrepancy. These give rise to the harmonious and the unharmonious forms of
Quality.
These original forms are further subdivided into their several cases or applications, and these are then made the basis of the derivative forms, being the same principles in application to a number of terms greater than two in each
case.
original principle of Quantity (I take this case as an divides genuinely into the forms of the great, which rests on comparison of definite large and definite small, and the perfect, in which the greater is considered as the pur-
The
illustration)
pose of the less.' This is a category of Herbart's aesthetical ethic, which Zimmermann introduces into aesthetic proper. Spuriously, further, the form of Quantity gives rise to the sublime, when the aspiration after an infinite quantity, which cannot really be presented in idea, is compared with a definite
1 A., 37. * lb., 31.
^ lb.,
^
42-3-
* -'*.
4135.
lb.
* !b., p.
378
quantity.
The
qualitative difference
is
between an aspiration
and a quantity
thus taken account of, and the sublime falls outside pure quantity and complete conception, and becomes one of the twilight or romantic conceptions. In the "harmonious form of Quality," * the pleasure which harmony produces is ascribed to the predominant identity of the qualities of the terms, and confirmation is claimed for the reason view on the ground of Helmholtz's researches. for mentioning this particular instance, in which probably the theory is seen at its best, is that the good fortune which has attended the explanation of musical consonance by the ratio between periods of oscillation, has made Zimmermann very eager to extend a similar proceeding to the explanation of colour harmony. But there is no real correspondence between It is very doubtful whether complementary the two cases. colours are to a cultivated sense those that naturally harIf they were so, then the explanation by blending monise.^ of the identical would be false, for true complementary colours And share absolutely no element of light * with each other. the eye is absolutely incapable of detecting the elements of a compound colour, and being pleased or the reverse in consequence of their ratios of oscillation.* No one knew, before it was experimentally determined, that yellow was a combination Every one believed that. green was a comof red and green. bination of blue and yellow. Thus it is fairly certain that no form of the numerical analysis which accounts for musical harmony will also account for colour harmony. -Esthetic judgment appears, in the above case of red and blue, to be distorted by the desire to find demonstrable " relations " in the If such relations exist, they are not parallel to colour scale. those of sound. The general theory as applied to these cases is expressed "The identical element in the content of the two as follows. terms of the form, will seek to produce blending; the opposed
My
A., 42. Cf. Z. A., 250, on " red and blue," which he condemns as " peasant's fashion," because not complementary, with Ward in Eniycl. Brit, art.
1
" Psychology," p. 69, where this combination is explained as belonging to a refined taste than that which enjoys red and green. 3 Disregarding the mere impurity of ordinary coloured light, on which Zimmermann is ultimately driven to base his theory. A., 43, note. * Helmholtz's Lectures, First Series, E. Tr., p. 92.
more
THE SIMPLEST iKSTHETIC QUALITY.
379
elements to produce inhibition. The former, which would naturally take place in consequence of the partial identity of the qualities, is hindered by the latter, which keeps the members of the form apart. The opposition sets up tension between the terms which the identity is attempting to unite. Through this there arises a state like that of the question. If then the identity of the members prevails, this tension is relaxed the opposition that causes it is overcome without being abolished blending takes place, and with it a feeling of
; ;
pleasure."
plies his
very simple example in which Zimmermann apviews ought in justice to be mentioned, for it has, I think, considerable interest. Building up the work of art from its simplest elements, Zimmermann starts with the Imagination of abstract Synthesis.^ A point in space, he here explains, is Two points, even, simple, and so without aesthetic quality. relation, being strictly undistinguishable. have no aesthetic And because they are without aesthetic relation, so is the distance between them. (I should have thought, that on Zimmermann's principles, this was because qua distance it is simple.) If two such distances (systems of two points) are presented, an aesthetic relation arises. Assuming them to be unequal, then according to the form of quantity the greater is pleasing, Hartmann objects to this form that the lesser unpleasing. it makes the aesthetic judgment, upon the presentation as But the fact is, I think, well a whole, self-contradictory.
One more
observed, and the contradiction, as I understand, is Zimmermann's postulate. For he continues by pointing out that if there is a common measure (I presume "to perception" should be added), the discord is reconciled and the case of If the disagreement sets in, accompanied with pleasure. incommensurable, the percipient is stimulated to tances are and in the supply a distance that will harmonise them " beauty beauty of pure measurement so arising, "metrical there is the semblance of disproportion overcome by the ultimate perception of proportion. Thus there is, he would, I imagine, desire us to infer, a sense of economy or simplifica-
" Zusammenfassendes VorP. 188. I take this to be the meaning of his " Empfindendes Vorstellen " and! stellen," which is a first stage followed by
2
A;
434.
" Gedanken Vorstellen."
380
tion against waste
and
destruction, that
is
to say, combinec
with enlargement of the field of consciousness. iv. In the end, all these principles of pure form Meffig i?the within the course of ideas appear to be cases ol ^ ^^^^ ^ ""^^'^ between attention, which is a ûsvSiS^* quantity that has a limit, and the field of consciousness. Ideas or images accompanied by adequate attenEnlargement oi tion are, it is suggested,* always pleasant. the field of consciousness, therefore, is as such accompanied with pleasure, so long as it is compatible with adequate attention. Economy of attention is pleasant as instrumental to adequacy. Interruption or baffling of attention is relatively a narrowing of the field of consciousness, and is felt as tending to inadequacy of attention. Such waste of attention by interruption and baffling is felt for example in dissonance. The confusion of a discord is compared to " trying to reckon up a sum in one's head, and failing because the numbers are too high." ^ All mere interruption is painful in itself. Flickeringlights, meaningless noises, false rhythms, ^ intermittent irritations of the skin, are analogous examples.* Clearness, truth in rhythm, in short, simplification, are economical of attention and so pleasant in themselves. It is obvious that in this doctrine of pleasantness, which as determined by the pure inter-relation of images is, as far as it goes, sesthetic pleasantness, we have a counterpart to the principle of unity in variety as applied by objective analysis to nature and art. Could the formalistic doctrine be elaborated in detail for the other departments of aesthetic, as it has been in the prerogative example of musical consonance and dissonance, we should obtain as a result a complete translation of objective aesthetic into terms of the course of ideas with its pleasantness and unpleasantness, just as we have, in recent psychology, important rudiments of such a translation for logic and for ethics in the theory of apperceptive masses guiding both the unpractical and the practical course of the It seems natural, however, that this very abstract mind.
1 By I have attempted to throw J. Ward, "Psychology," in JEncy^l. Brit. together the explanation of pleasantness due to intensity and to quality.
Preyer, quoted by Ward, l.c. " I would rather go to the treadmill for an hour than walk a mile between two asynchronous bipeds." Henniker's Triflesfor Travellers, * Ward, I.C., and Helmholtz, Lectures, Series i. p. 88.
*
8
VALUE OF SIMPLE
CASES,
38
kind of explanation (abstract, because dealing merely with identity and contrast as such) should continue to be most effective within the limits which Herbart assigned it,^ and should give way to more worldly language when we come to analyse the individual shapes in which sesthetic unity embodie itself. Zimmermann manages to deduce a " form of the characteristic" from his abstract principles, but being a relation of identity between archetype and copy, it is not convincing as
applied within the course of ideas.
But it is very much to have a clear explanation of simple extreme cases in such explanation almost every science finds its strictest demonstrative support, and to feel the whole value of a really definite formal aesthetic it is only necessary to read Plato's statement* of the true problem of harmonic theory in connection with the discoveries of the " Tonempfind;
ttngen."
Feohner
^'
^^ ^^
it
aesthetic,
is
* ^^ ''" ^^'""^^t with formal plainly necessary to take steps for
testing the actual agreeableness of various isolated forms to unbiassed taste. To have attempted this task by systematic experiment is the merit of Fechner,' whose researches, although including valuable enquiries into the beauty of association, display on the whole a decidedly formalistic bent. ! prefaces the account* of his own expericritioiBmofPreTiouB inquirioB. ments with geometrical form by referring to the ideas of previous enquirers, upon which he passes two noticeable criticisms. First, he observes, nearly all of them aim at establishing some one normal form or relation as par excellence that of beauty, whereas in fact each of these has value only within certain limits, and there is no such thing as a normal line or shape of beauty. Secondly, it has been the rule by way of obtaining the pure form to omit all reference to asso-
He
ciation,
which
is
really
much more important element
of the
Seep. 371 supra. Hep. 531 C. " To consider what numbers are harmonious, and what are not so, and for what reason in each case." Plato is demanding the real He is fully reason, as opposed to the empirical observation of consonance. in the spirit of modern science, although of course he did not know where to look for his reason. The well-known writer on " Psychophysics." His principal work bearing, on Êsthetic is VorschuU d. yEsthetik, 1876.
*
'^
'
Vorsch. d. A.,
i.
184.
382
beautiful than the
pure form itself. Among the forms of beauty suggested by previous enquirers, he enumerates the circle as handed down from antiquity, the ellipse as advocated by Winckelmann, the undulating and spiral lines and the pyramidal shape insisted on by Hogarth ; the square, and in general the relation i to i, preferred by recent German writers as the most readily comprehensible and therefore the most aesthetically advantageous relation the simple rational
;
relations generally (i to
i,
to
2, etc.)
and
finally Zeising's
golden section,
on the same ground propounded by him, not

;
merely as a normal sesthetic relation, but as a proportion predominant throughout the whole of nature and art.^ " 0"^ set of Fechner's experiments may be Experiments with Rectangles, etc. briefly described to show the kind of observations made and results attained. He asked ^ for judgments of distinct preference and rejection from a large number of different persons upon the satisfactoriness, elegance, or beauty of ten rectangles of equal area, cut out in white card and laid unsorted on a black surface. They varied in shape from a square to a figure with sides as 2 5, the golden-section rectangle with its sides as 21 34 being seventh in order of length, counting from the square. Generally speaking, the judgments of preference increased and the judgments of rejection diminished from the two extremes (square ^ and longest rectangle) to the golden-section rectangle, which had 35 per cent,
: :
of the preferences, and absolutely no rejections.
It would have been interesting to try a differently framed series. I should suggest a tendency to prefer a form that was not extreme in the given series. Most of the persons began by saying that it all depended on the application to be made of the figure, and on being told
showed much hesitation in choosing. Fechner's general results with regard to these figures and to the division of straight lines into segments, are that the square * and the rectangle nearest to it on the one hand, and
to disregard this,
1 Cf. p. 41 above. The proportion in question, it will be remembered, is that in which the lesser is to the greater as the greater to the sum of the two. It is applied by Zeising to any two principal dimensions in a figure. ' V. d. A., i. 192 and 195. * The square, however, had a few more preferences than the rectangle next The longest rectangle had no such preference over its neighbour. to it. *
See note
',
THE PREFERABLE RECTANGLE.
383
the longest rectangle on the other hand, are the least pleasing. The simple rational relations (corresponding, it has been suggested, to musical consonance) show absolutely no superior pleasantness to those which can only be expressed by ratios of much larger numbers (corresponding to dissonance). The golden-section rectangle, and its immediate neighbours have a real superiority in pleasantness to the other rectangles. The least deviation from symmetry has a far more decided unpleasantness than a proportionally much greater deviation from the golden section. In dividing a horizontal line, the golden section is decidedly less pleasant than bisection.^ In dividing a vertical figure, say in determining the point of insertion of the arm of a cross, 2. the golden section is less pleasant than the ratio of i These results, together with the uncertainty of judgment shown by those who contributed to them, support the general view which I have taken of formal beauty. Doubtless some slight but definite reason exists for the preference thus displayed as between certain figures, but conformably to the slightness of the content which such bare forms can symbolise, it is readily overcome by any concrete application of them. Thus in the measurements of picture frames, there is customarily a wide deviation from the golden section, and the customary ratio between height and breadth is different according as the height exceeds the breadth, or the breadth exceeds the This shows the overpowering influence of the conheight.^ For sheer abstract figures, height crete upon the abstract. and breadth have no meaning. The slight exceptional rise of preference for the square seems quite intelligible, owing to the unique character impressed upon this figure by the total absence of difference between its sides. Mere uniqueness, incapability of being confused with anything else, is attractive per se. Simplicity, stability, and many such properties naturally connect themselves, and have always been felt to do so, with this same absence of difference in the dimensions of this figure.' At
:
^ 2
See on Zimmermann,
V. d. A.,
ii.
p.
379 above.
it
If height is greater, 292. breadth, it is to height as 4 3 ; i.e. there height, probably not hard to explain.
:
is
is
to breadth as 5 4 ; if a feeling against excess of

:
* TTpaya)vos
wev
i^dyov.
" Foursquare without blame," of the good
man
in
Ar. Ethics,
i.
10, 11.
384
the same time difference has its attractions but plainly must go far enough to escape confusion with the square, and attain some sort of balance (the grounds of which I do not profess myself able to suggest) before it can surpass the pleasantness of the simple unity of the square. Fechner's aesthetic laws, with the excepiii. iEsthetlc Laws. tion of the law of association and perhaps of the law of economy, are very much the laws of Greek sesthetic. Such are the law of unity in variety, of congruousness, of
;
clearness.
But newer ground
principle of association
opened up by his treatment of the and of the law of economy. In speaking of Herbart, we saw reason to suspect that in
is
^
ascribing the pleasantness of presented qualities to their dependence on abstract relations, the narrow paths of strict For if we once go formalism had already been abandoned. behind the sensuous presentation, are we not in fact looking What indeed is a ratio, for the perception of for a reason ? beauty, if it is not a reason ? Granted that smoothness of the course of our ideas, and its reverse, may attach to such relations, may not other less abstract and more controlling If we assume that this properties attach to them as well ? criticism is just, it follows that even in exact enquiry the candid course is to admit that we are looking not only for an actual cause of pleasure, but for a reason in the cause, while we retain the spirit of " formalism " so far as to insist that no reason shall be relevant but one which is inherent in, and not Schopenhauer casually annexed to, the sense-presentation.* and Herbart were right in being suspicious of association for association may be taken to mean arbitrary or chance conMr. Ruskin's treatment of the pathetic fallacy * is an nection, invaluable analysis of the dangers of ungrounded association. But yet, those who do not admit that any elements of the universe are " cut off with an ixe " from the rest, may fairly approve of an enquiry into the inherent aesthetic associations of given forms and if the phrase which I have used is held to be a contradiction in terms, then the part of it which we
;
^.,
J.
93is
;
in the main Herbart's attitude to association cism, A.,i. 119. 3 M. P., iii. 157. 1732
This
see Fechner's Criti-
COLOUR- ASSOCIATIONS.
385
must
retain is the limitation " inherent," and the term " association "must be replaced by " significance" or " symbolism." It is prima facie a reasonable extension of formalism to ask what sort of content this or the other form is by its essential constitution adapted to express.
Fechner has boldly attacked the most

analysable of
all
difficult
because least
sesthetic problems,
that of the import or
His execution of the attempt does not seem equal to his conception of it. He relies almost wholly on the distribution of colours in nature. But plausible as it may seem to associate our feeling for red with the ideas of blood and fire, or our feeling for blue with the idea of the sky, I have serious doubts whether their association ought really to be treated as essential. It must be clearly understood that in any decoration which definitely recalls the forms of plants there is more to be considered than the association of colours as such. I do not say that we should not be shocked if a plant were presented in decoration with red leaves and green petals but yet the colours even of plants are very freely treated for decorative purposes, and we have not the least dislike to a plant form depicted entirely in shades of red. fortioH the colour in itself, when no natural form is portrayed, and the colour harmonies, certainly seem to be independent of naturalistic association and probably some investigations on the older lines, referring to purity or other actual properties of the hue as affecting the eye, not neglecting its implied harmonious or inharmonious relation to our ordinary surroundings, would have better success than the mere reference to natural associations. It may be pointed out as supporting this view, that a very slight difference of shade and of gradation throws association wholly off" the track. The colour of a very hot fire has nothing that reminds us of bloodred, and I do not believe that a house door painted with the green of the first spring leaves would have any kind of association with the beauty of spring. In analysing the inherent associations of the concave and convex * Fechner seems more successful, plainly owing to the
;
" associations " of the isolated colours.'
greater facility for analysis afforded by their complex forms. He has no difficulty in showing that the concave appears as a rule receptive, and the convex exclusive or repellent, except
1
M.P.,
iii.
100.
72.^
105
C C
386
in
the case of surfaces such as those of cushions, which are in order to become concave. In this region of essential association Fechner does not obtain any great results. But, if detailed analysis, such as exact aesthetic pursues, is to have any value at all, I think that his method points in the right direction. As a case closely analogous to the results of such analysis, we may treat the phenomena of the law of economy, which
convex
Fechner ranks, after his eclectic manner, as "a principle of sesthetic." In reality, this principle is merely a deduction from the law of unity in variety, and as directed against superfluity in the parts of an aesthetic structure coincides almost verbally with Aristotle's warning, that a part which is not necessary is no part of the whole. ^ " In their treatise on the organs of locomotion," writes Professor Vierordt,^ "the brothers Weber ^ have demonstrated, in several passages and by striking examples, that the aesthetically beautiful is also on the whole the physiologically correct that the two coincide, that the impression of beauty (ease, unconstrainedness, freedom) is always produced by results attained at the least possible expense of
;
muscular force." This principle, as Fechner observes, may be treated either with reference to the content of our presentations, in which it is pleasant to us, through sympathy, to see the economical employment of force, or with reference to the course of our presentations, there being an economy of attention in the observation of movements that are economical in the expenditure of force. Both of these aspects of the law of economy were insisted on by Mr. Herbert Spencer,* as early as the years 1852 and 1854 respectively. The second is capable of being treated as a law of pure formalistic psychology, and Fechner is led by it to raise the whole
question of the psychical nature and conditions of pleasure, without, however, arriving at a positive conclusion. Only he decides that it is impossible to set up the law of economy as
P. 32 above.
Quoted by Fechner, V. d. A., ii. 263. See reference to their work in Ward, " Psychology," Encyd. Brit. * Essay on The Philosophy of Style " and on " Gracefulness," republished in Essays Scientific^ Politiccd, and Speculative, vol. ii.
*
*
THE LAMP OF
SACRIFICE.
387
the fundamental principle of aesthetic psychology. It is, indeed, as we have seen, a plainly derivative law. It is worth while, in order to remove a seeming contradiction with the deepest aesthetic criticism, to point out that this principle, being simply a consequence of the relation of parts within a whole, can have no claim to determine what the nature of the whole, its essence or purpose, shall be. Thus we find room for the apparently antagonistic principle of lavishness or sacrifice. good engineer does not adjust his supporting forces with absolute exactness to the greatest estimated burden. He leaves a margin of safety against unforeseen hazards which has, even in works of pure utility, a sort of aesthetic effect in the mental security of all who are concerned with the structure. And so, we are told to-day, with apparent truth, a certain lavishness of force is a noble quality not merely in the ornament, but in the very substantiality and strength of domestic buildings. Security of mind, the sense of permanence, the absence of any suggestion that the building is meanly calculated to the immediate owner's interest, appear to be aesthetic properties which demand a certain bounty and largeness in the provision of strength and solidity. In a more intense degree these same properties take the form of "sacrifice";^ but neither a margin of safety, nor lavishness, nor sacrifice, is identical with waste or incompatible with economy. large conception of purpose and the most effective adjustment of forces to effect is one thing it when conceived is another. From Fechner we have gained but little in positive principle, but something in method and tangible elucidation, which latter is very necessary to aesthetic science if it is not to hang in midair. And our judgment of formal aesthetic, that it is the theory of antiquity armed with the methods of modern science, has in him received a striking confirmation. 6. So far, finally, as I am able to form an opinion stumpt Scope of his Analysis, qjj fj^g development of psychological theory respecting music in the hands of Professor Stumpf,^ it appears
of Sacrifice " in Seven Lamps of Architecture, where the disand waste is well insisted on, and Wordsworth's sonnet on King's College Chapel. 3 Author of Musikpsychologie in England, 1885, and Tonpsychologie, of which vol. ii. appeared in 1890.
1
See "
Lamp
tinction between bounty
388
to
'^
me that Herbart's original admissions retain their full force. The completed work of musical art, even in the comparatively-
simple form of an entire melody, does not, as I gather, come The facts of constrictly within the scope of his analysis. the "blending" of tones, an ethical or sonance produced by emotional import* ascribed to single sounds of certain definite types (soft deep notes, soft high notes, etc.) and to certain definite intervals, and some very general conditions of musical pleasure such as dim analogies with verbal utterance, and the constant renewal of the listener's expectation, appear to be the only factors which exact psychology is able as yet to discern The difficulty by analysis within the musically beautiful. which Herbart admitted still remains the elements which can be readily analysed do not penetrate into the characteristic differences which make one musical whole beautiful and And there is in the background another trivial or tedious. a dark suspicion that these alleged expressive qualities of isolated factors may be really faint associative suggestions drawn from the character which they assume in those complex combinations of which they most readily remind us. In taking leave at this point of purely 7. ', Conclusion. formal or exact aesthetic for in the t-nghsh and German writers who have yet to be considered we shall only I will attempt in a find it in subordination to other ideas few paragraphs to estimate its achievement and its prospects. imust not test it by a standard which it is How judge of Formal jjsthetic. g. blunder to apply to any aesthetic theory whatNo esthetic theory* can give appreciable assistance in ever. the construction of individual works of art, or can adequately represent their beauty in another, vis. an intellectual medium. should do injustice to Herbart and Zimmermann, if we
;
.',
o,. -.i;..C
We
We
1 Not being qualified to judge independently in musical questions, I here, follow the representations of the late Mr. Edmund Gurney in the paper "The Psychology of Music," Tertium Quid, ii. 251. only addition to his argument consists in noting the parallelism between defects which he ascribes to the views of Prof. Stumpf, and the admissions made by Herbart. See p. 37 1 above. ^ This ascription while far too little for objective ideaHsm is far too much for exact formalism. * What about counterpoint, which Herbart includes in aesthetic? The answer is, that the artist may embody his experience in rules, though it is hazardous, especially outside music, to attach great value to them. But these rules are data of aesthetic, not its content, because they come from the practice of the art and not from reflection upon its capacities.
My
LIMIT OF FORMAL iESTHETIC.
389
were to
interpret their conviction
of the all-importance of
elementary relations, as indicating the belief that works of genius could be constructed by rule and line, or fairly represented in a system of abstract reflections. For exact
aesthetic of concrete idealism, the only conceivable problem is the explanation of beauty in the light of general principles aided by the analysis of individual examples given in nature or in art. iiIf therefore formal aesthetic is pronounced Lesson of Its History. 3^ failure in the presence of concrete individual beauty, this verdict does not refer to the task of prior construction, nor of reproduction in intellectual form, but only to the problem of subsequent analysis for speculative purposes. Allowing for the greater depth and variety of modern exact science as compared with that of antiquity, the work of formal aesthetic in modern times corresponds with the strictly Greek aesthetic of Plato and Aristotle, and is checked, as in the main theirs also was checked, at the point where beauty passes into concrete individual form. Whole and part, unity in variety, siniple colours, simple sounds (to which in modern times we must add simple consonances and unsuccessful attempts to deal with colour-harmony), spatial figures, rhythms (and in modern analysis the peculiar case of rhyme) are the objectmatter about which exact aesthetic is able to supplement the suggestions of the Greek philosophers from the wealth of modern physics and modern psychology. That with this achievement it has attained its limit as an independent method appears to be proved both by its diveraesthetic, as for the
gences and by its concessions. We cannot but be surprised when we find that the thinkers
who set out by holding tight to the beautiful datum in its sensuous peculiarity,^ are also those who attribute its peculiar effectiveness to the most abstract and isolated underlying relations. It is true that the relation is conceived as a genuine cause operating in an assignable mode, and not reducible to a mere mathematical expression, but this does not alter the fact
that the operation, as defined by the relation, is of so general a nature as to be void of relevancy to the individual beautiful effect in a context of art, as distinguished from that which is not beautiful in such a context.
^
Herbart,
I.e.,
p.
369 supra.
390
And thus, to refer for a moment to an English writer for the sake of illustration, we find that within the exact school the peculiarity of the concrete datum comes at last to be vehemently asserted,^ against the psychological side of the school, as incompatible with the analysis of it by dissolution, and with the reference of its character in fragments to abstract
and
isolated relations.
This antagonism seems really to be implicit in Herbart. Intellectual analysis of the datum, when once entered upon, It must go forward cannot come to rest in abstractions. till it recognises* on the intellectual side a concreteness adequate to that which the datum of beauty exhibits on the
sensuous
side.
The concessions of formal aesthetic tell the same tale. Zimmermann as compared with Herbart we notice, a, the
In
in-
clusion of the " characteristic" in the list of formal relations an extraordinary tour de force; and, b, the softening of the opposition between classical and romantic, which in Herbart and Schopenhauer meant a degree of preference for the more narrowly definite forms of art, into a distinction, applicable to all periods of history, between beauty that attaches to complete conception and beauty attached to incomplete conception and dependent for its attractiveness on subjective interests. Room is thus made to include great work of any period under the term " classical."
Further, in Fechner, in Prof. Stumpf, and in the best recent English psychology and exact musical theory,' the principle of association is accepted as of paramount importance, in contradiction with Schopenhauer, and essentially with Herbart. Even the term " utterance " has been applied by the very competent analyst* above referred to, as indicating by analogy a peculiar impression which beautiful melody conveyed to his mind. These divergences and concessions exhibit, if I am right, the spectacle, too familiar in philosophy, of the concrete worldspirit freakishly decoying into blind paths the explorer who has refused his guidance, and coming in by the window when he is barred out at the door.
1
By Gurney, Tertium
Quid,
ii.
279, in opposition to Stumpf.
* I 8 *
do not say " constructs." E.g. in Ward and Gurney.

Gurney,
ib.,
274.
BEAUTY AND ATTENTION.

*"
39
Bwt iêtic used

upon
itself
Inclusion of
^^
in
^^^ been remarked with regard to what ethics to be called Utilitarianism, now
commonly known as Hedonism, that it takes the hazard of exclusiveness. Other theories do not profess to exclude it, but it professes to exclude them. The same is true of the relation between formal aesthetic and the aesthetic of concrete idealism. There can be no precise analysis of the psychical operation of beautiful form for which a place is not ready and waiting in the theory of beauty as expressiveness. Enough has been said, I hope, in dealing with the Greek thinkers to make this relation absolutely clear. Only it may be well to supply out of the present chapter a single link which there remained in then supposed that the a great measure hypothetical. simple forms which please, derive their satisfactoriness from some latent affinity, other than sensuous stimulation, between In the principle them and the feeling of intelligent beings. of economy as applied to the pleasure of watching graceful
We
movements, by Fechner and his authorities, we appear to In the follow the actual operation of such a latent harmony. economical of force embodies the first place, movement principle of organic unity, negatively requiring the absence Ultimately indeed the principle of superfluous elements. This absence of that of the characteristic. develops into superfluity we realise in terms of feeling by inherent associaAnd in the second tion with our own muscular adjustments. place it is suggested that in the apprehension of such movements our attention is so economised that as a psychical occurrence the apprehension is easy and pleasant /er se, so that we have at once our satisfactory content and an agreeable perAnd as adequacy of expression to content is ception of it. not an accident, but the very essence of beauty, it is not improbable that this thoroughgoing connection between the working of our attention and the properties of a beautiful It is plain, of course, that content may turn out to be normal. in concrete cases of beauty the psychical occurrences must be required to take on very complex shapes, which may or may
not in individual minds undo their own agreeableness by fatigue owing to their sheer quantity, or by contradictions beyond the reconciling power of the individual mind in question.
The
reader should remember that for the reason alleged
392
above, the principle of lavishness
is not opposed to that of economy. The most graceful movements are often those which are superfluous when judged by definite purposes of life but their course will possess a harmonious unity which will be distinguishable from the inharmonious and wasteful
;
abruptness of similar movements ungracefully performed. Finally, it may be laid down that idealism without detail is idle speculation and formal or exact aesthetic, in its various shapes as the observation of universally beautiful structure, as its analysis into abstract relations, and as the causal explanation of their agreeableness in terms of the psychical movement, is an indispensable instrument in the hand of
;
idealism.
But in the analysis of the great individual creations of art or the more complex effects of nature, it is not probable that all the links of formal explanation will ever be supplied. In these cases the delight of self-utterance and self-recognition overrides, though it cannot dispense with, the elements of abstract satisfaction, and the appreciation of character and passion and the moods of Nature, though at every turn sustained and elucidated, will not be exhaustively analysed by exhibiting the rationale of composition in all its minutise, and of harmonious effect upon sense-perception. And moreover we shall find that in the employment of such analysis, conformably to a principle on which I have more than once insisted, the interpreter who is on the alert for refinements of import that is, the idealist with a grasp of reality will distance all competitors.
CHAPTER
Typo of the
XIV.
THE METHODICAL COMPLETION OF OBJECTIVE IDEALISM.

^- While the votaries of exact aesthetic were attempting to explain the pleasantness of beauty ^Meauim!^'^* in terms of psychological analysis, the heirs of objective Idealism were striving to attain a corresponding precision in the method of their content- or expressiontheory. In the course of this attempt they called attention to a neglected question of supreme aesthetic importance in the problem of ugliness, and also in some degree included the formalistic point of view in their own by appropriating from modern science its best warranted analyses of aesthetic
phenomena.
On
the other hand, with the increased accentuation
of
method, and the attempt to summarise results in accurate abstractions, their work has unavoidably assumed a certain tinge of scholasticism. By this term I designate the divorce between content and formulation nor can I altogether conceal my conviction that the appreciation of actual beauty among
;
the
German
less vital,
though
aesthetic philosophers of the last half century is infinitely more learned, than that shown by
the giant race
whom
they succeeded.
characteristic of the most distinguished of the recent aesthetic writers in Germany demands our special attention,
criticising it the present writer is also by implication criticising himself. It is easy to. say that the substantive strength of the idealist school resides throughout in its historical research, and in illustration of this to compare the historical method of Schelling and Hegel, or of Winckelmann and Schiller, with the historical treatises of Schasler, Zimmermann,^ Carriere, Lotze, and Hartmann. But when we look closer at the two types of thought which are thus compared,
* Taking Zimmermann, who is a formalist, as representing by his historical treatment the rapprochement between formahsts and idealists alluded to above.
One
although in
393
394
essential difference
we observe an
between them. In the depends upon the conception that the evolution of beauty in all its phases and stages is
earlier type, the historical factor
The "dialectic" is the object-matter of aesthetic science. conceived as " immanent " as consisting, that is to say, in the operation of historical forces and in the cumulative inThe opinions of fluence of the human mind upon itself. philosophers do not appear in sesthetic, but are more completely correlated with the world and with each other in the full context of the history of philosophy. In the later type, the science has become definitory and formal, and the history, no longer directly included in the object-matter of the science, has turned into a chronicle of philosophic opinion. In this way the science and the history have fallen apart ; and we have passed from the scientific history of the actual beautiful, to its formal, though would-be concrete, analysis on the one hand, and to the history of aesthetic philosophy as such upon the other. Now it is true that the latter may be utilised as the clarified expression of the former and it is true that Schasler, and more fully the learned and enthusiastic Carriere, have understood the historical problem in this way. The present writer however, while aware that he is to a great extent following in their track, has attempted to bend back the line of historical enquiry towards the evolution of beauty as an objective though mental phenomenon, and away from the mere affiliation of philo-
sophical opinions.
.2; Transition to the Later Objective critical
ût before proceeding to deal with the and methodical views of such writers as
those just mentioned, it is necessary to trace the antecedents of their position in the admission within aesthetic philosophy of the theory of ugliness, which had been knocking at the door ever since the beginning of romantic art, if not ever since Plotinus. " ^^^ *^^' Lessing admitted the ugly Boiger into poetry as a means to the comic and the terrible,^ while denying it a place in formative art and that SchlegeP definitely proposed it as an object of theoretical inquiry, intending to keep it wholly outside the beautiful, but finding how inevitably it forced its way in. In Goethe and
^^
P. 226 sufra.
P. 301 supra.
THE THEORY OF UGLINESS.

Schiller,
395
of this subject.
Kant and Hegel, we found no elaborate treatment In Goethe and Hegel, however, this was
partly due to the very amplitude and robustness of their conception of beauty. For the fact of real aesthetic moment on this side is the extension and deepening of the beautiful by the inclusion of apparent ugliness, and when this, the ugly that can enter into the beautiful, is provided for, the detailed analysis of the ugly, if any, that can never be taken up into beauty, is less essential to aesthetic science. observed upon Goethe's sympathy for the strong and the significant or characteristic, and we noted that for Hegel ugliness is a relative conception, depending on a contradiction with true individuality, and only rising to absoluteness if and in as far as such a contradiction assumes the form of irreconIn this point, the existence of apparent cilable perversity. or merely relative ugliness, he is more truly represented by the thoroughly concrete theorists such as Schasler and Hart-
We
mann, than by those who, with Rosenkranz though even they not wholly consider ugliness as essentially falling outside the beautiful. This latter view, which was necessary to pave the way for an explicit recognition of the place of apparent ugliness within concrete characterization, is briefly and pregnantly formulated in Solger's lectures on .(Esthetic.^ I quote a leading passage, from which Solger's relation to Schlegel
and also to later theorists on the subject of ugliness, may be clearly seen The Comic and the Tragic, Solger is maintaining,^ both Beauty as such lie within the conception of the beautiful. perfect unity of idea and phenomenon {" Brscêtnun^"), is the and is opposed both to the pure idea, and to the common:
place
phenomenon or manifestation ("jErscAemung'') of reality. Tragedy is the " idea " as emphasized by annihilation of it
Comedy is the idea recognised as (in the phenomenon*). asserting itself throughout even the most commonplace But if, instead of asserting itself, it ceases to be existence.
^ Delivered 1819, prepared for publication by Heyse, and published in 1829 (before the appearance of Hegel's Esthetic). The lectures are more
direct to be.
2
and scientific in style than Solger's dialogue Erwin (1815) appears For an estimate of Solger, see Hegel's ^sth.., Introd., E. Tr. p. 131..
Vorlesungen iiber Aesiheiik, pp. 100-102.

P. 102.
396
recognised in the sphere of common life and phenomena, then either we have the prosaic view of the world, which fails to be ugly only because it is wholly apart from aesthetic feeling, or we have ugliness, which arises " when * the human mind finds in the commonplace phenomenon ('m dergemeinen Erscheinung ') something essential, wherein the phenomenon, divorced from the idea, has independent reality. This element," he continues, " becomes as an independent principle
the opposite of beauty, and so the commonplace phenomenon becomes the exact opposite of the idea.^ In this consists the principle of the ugly, the basis of which is not in mere defectiveness by the standard of natural laws. And, again, the ugly does not consist in the serious (prosaic) consideration of things this belongs rather to moral judgment, being wholly removed from the conception of the beautiful. "If anything is to be recognised as the opposite of the beautiful, the same thing must be looked for in it that is looked If the idea is for in the beautiful, and the opposite found. really lacking, and the mere phenomenon gives itself out for the essence, then the ugly makes its appearance. The ugly is a rebellion against the beautiful, as the evil against the good. It is always a pretended principle, in which the different tendencies of existence converge [as they do truly in the beautiful]. Natural imperfections are not ugly, except in so far as in this complication of external forces something is taken to reveal itself which aims at concentrating these mere forces as essential in themselves.' Bodily ugliness only arises through a false principle of mere existence \e.g. of animal as against spiritual existence, or mere cell-growth against healthy animal life] being foisted upon the human organism. Just so, a disposition which opposes itself to the beautiful by concentrating the commonplace into a single point,* and acquiescing therein, is an ugly disposition. Mere contingency and maladaptation, therefore, are not enough to constitute ugliness ; it is necessary in addition
;
*
-vi.,
The
" Erscheinung "). * i.e. no doubt, as forming an individu:-.! existence antagonistic to that in which they appear Uke parasites, etc. * In the sense, I imagine, of making it a purpose.
Vorlesungen iiber Aestketik, p. loi. derivation of Vischer's view from this is very plain ; see K. G., 113, on the war between the idea and and the image ("Bild," or
UGLINESS AKIN TO BEAUTY.
397
that in the things which are thus self-contradictory there shall be a unity, which [really] could only be the idea, but is sought for in purely phenomenal existence. " The ugly is the first form in which commonplace existence opposes itself to the beautiful, Like evil, it displays itself only as the negation of the idea, but as a negation that assumes positive shape, inasmuch as it aspires to set itself in the place of the latter." " The ugly is therefore positively opposed to the beautiful, and we can only regard them as absolutely exclusive of each other." The noteworthy results of this conception are two. First, real ugliness is thus treated as a positive negation or falsehood aspiring to the place of beauty, and therefore absolutely exclusive of the latter and excluded by it. This, in so far as we are able at all to recognise real or invincible ugliness as a fact, we shall find to be the true explanation of that fact. But secondly, as ugliness is thus identified with a certain positive relation of the same factors that enter into beauty, as something in which we look for beauty though we do not find it, an affinity between the two is admitted. There thus arises a tendency to bring the ugly closer and closer to the frontier of the beautiful, as bearing special relation to one or other of the species generated within the phases of beauty by the changing correlation of its elements. Thus, as I understand
Solger in the Lectures on Esthetic, though he does not think that the ugly qud ugly can come within the borders of art (and in this, with Weisse and against Rosenkranz, he is surely right), yet it is essential to his view that beauty in passing through its phases from the sublime to the comic comes very close to the ugly, from which it is only saved by the self-assertion of the strong and cheerful idea or ideal within the most wretched phenomenal details, giving rise to the spirit of true comedy. Here we have the germ of a theory dealing not only with ugliness outside the beautiful, but with the appearance of a necessary movement within the realm of beauty towards something akin to ugliness. ^- ^ ^ "^ propose to attempt an adequate Beference to weiase and account of Weisse^ or of Vischer.* ^' Weisse appears to have had the substantial
* '
Weisse's Aesthetik, 1830. Vischer's Aesthetik, 1846-57, comprises two vols, of general theory re-
398
merit of insisting on the position of ugliness in aesthetic theory, and especially of insisting on Solger's point that positive or actual ugliness (as distinct from mere defectiveness of beauty) is something that claims the place and simulates the powers of the beautiful a morbid but fascinating presentation. He does not contemplate the entrance of what is really ugly into the region of art except through entire subordination, which in his view can only take place by means of the comic or the romantic spirit. Thus, as Hartmann observes, the characteristic is omitted, excepting, we must add, in as far as it takes comic or romantic form. As a consequence of this omission it would seem that little light can be thrown on the enlargement or deepening of beauty in the strict sense. want to know how beauty itself is found to be modified and graduated, as in Winckelmann's account of it, by the claims of expression and of the characteristic with their introduction of apparent ugliness, and the addition of the comic and romantic to the forms of beauty does not thoroughly facet his problem. The defective synthesis betrays itself in defective aesthetic judgment. Thus, we are told, Weisse can see no beauty in waste and desert places. It seems to him that in them the inorganic elements refuse their function of acting as a basis for organic life. This notion is descended from Hegel's exaggerated estimate of the aesthetic importance attaching to the ascending scale of organic life. It is wholly discrepant with our present feeling for the beautiful.^ Moreover Weisse, as also Vischer and Rosenkranz, attempted a dialectic construction of the phases of beauty, somewhat on Solger's lines, bringing the ugly into special connection with the progressive movement from the sublime to the comic. There is no doubt that some connection may be traced between the phases of beauty and its progressive power of mastering and subordinating to itself the sterner and stranger elements of presentation. have seen in Hegel an attempt to exhibit such a movement, with full explanation of the immanent causes and cumulative influences by which the successive stages were brought to pass. It would be foolish to imply that Hegel's analysis is final, and I only refer
We
We
specting beauty, continued in four vols, entitled Die Kunste, dealing copiously with the several arts. i For Weisse's view of ugliness see Hartmann, Aesik., ii. 364 ff.
THE LATER
to
it
DIALECTIC.
399
emphasise the distinction between a dialectic own definite import, and one which seems simply to ring the changes upon technical terms of Eesthetic, and logical designations for forms of negative relation, which, apart from a very explicit context, convey no import at all.^ The self-conflicts of the beautiful lead, it is said, from the sublime through the ugly to the comic (Weisse), or the evolution passes from the sublime through the comic to the beautiful * (Vischer), or the beautiful denies itself in the ugly and is restored to itself in the comic (Rosenkranz). The underlying perception throughout all these expressions is probably that embodied in the passage quoted above from Solger and also involved in Hegel's view of the comic, that any conflict or meanness can be reconciled with beauty, if the strong and genial spirit of the ideal pervades it with a sense But in all this, though much truth is of victorious security. implied, there is no thorough-going reconstruction of the idea of beauty beauty remains a phase of the excellent in art, among other phases, or else is stretched into an unmeaning title, and the actual affinity that permeates the whole world of characteristic expression, which Goethe and Hegel had grasped, is in danger of being lost to view. In the case of Vischer, the enterprise of coping with his immense array of volumes is rendered especially disheartenin order to
which assigns
its
ing by the fact that the author himself in his later years has Two points criticised* his great work with severe candour. In the second part of the Esthetic, followare noteworthy. ing upon the metaphysic of the beautiful which occupies the " The beautiful in its one-sided first volume, and treating of he had dealt with beauty (i.) in its "objective" exisexistence," tence as the beauty of nature, and (ii.) in its "subjective" This distinction, in virtue of which existence as imagination. his treatment of natural beauty extended into an immense range of detail, surveying inorganic and organic nature, the types of humanity and the course of history, his later criticism " The section on natural beauty must rightly condemns.
go."
All beauty is in perception, and in fact whenever art and imagination are dealt with it is essential to recur to the
*
See below on Rosenkranz. See Schasler, A., 959. 3 Vischer, Kritische Gange, No. * Krif. G.,v. II.
1
5,
1863
No.
6,
1873.
400
The views of chap, i, ol material afforded them by nature. more strikingly confirmed. the present work could not be see a genuine treatment of natural beauty in its true relation to art in the whole range of Mr. Ruskin's critical
We
labours.
Again, Vischer's later criticism condemns as inadequate the now admits position given to ugliness in his great work. ^ that Weisse and Schasler have estimated more truly than himself the necessity of ugliness as an element without which the concrete modifications of the beautiful cannot arise. It must be added that in his treatment of poetry he remains wholly on the old ground of the distinction into Epic, Lyric,
He
and Dramatic, and therefore fails to appreciate the problem presented by the cessation of some types and the substitution Thus he attempts to force the Divina of others for them. Commedia into the form of an Epic, and as this is plainly impossible, pronounces the form of Dante's poem to be in
far more contradiction with the essence of poetic art.^ * is Schelling's estimate On the other hand it should be noted that Vischer has some conception of the relation between art and workmanship,* of the difficulties raised for the latter by modern mechanical production for the world-market, and of the problems affecting the future of art' in their whole perplexing intensity. There is much, therefore, in his works that would be of interest to the reader to-day, could it be disengaged from his formal dialectic and from the huge bulk of his volumes. But there is not much, I should imagine, which cannot now be obtained from other sources, and I therefore cannot help fearing that this colossal monument of real knowledge, capacity, and industry will have little effect on the future course of
How
profound
aesthetic science.
pass to Rosenkranz, who while beto the earlier post- Hegelians by his attachment to the ideas of Solger, yet treated the question of ugliness with a detail and insight which made his work a point of transition to the later and more thoroughly concrete conceptions. The connection is well marked by the fact that
7.
now
longmg
* *
Krit. G.,
vi.
115.
See
p.
325 supra.
Die Kiinste, Bk. iv., Die Kiinste, i. 87.

ii.
p. 1300.
' ib.,
337.
AestA.,
298.
THE NEGATION OF BEAUTY.
4OI
Schasler dedicates his Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik to
Rosenkranz.
Rosenkranz's work, The Esthetic point of view. The editor of Kant, and biographer of Hegel, he desired to complete the fabric of aesthetic theory on the side of it which appeared to him, not unjustly, to be defective. He accordingly conceives of Ugliness as a distinct object-matter, outside the beautiful, and thus demanding separate treatment, but determined throughout by relativity to the beautiful, and thus belonging to aesthetic theory. The ugly as such * is the negation of the beautiful, inasmuch as the same factors which give rise to beauty are capable of being perverted into their opposites I should have preferred to say, "perverted, by a change of relation, into its opposite." Ugliness and beauty are genuinely distinct, and the former does not enter into the latter as a constituent part but yet, as both contain the same factors, it is possible for the ugly to be subordinated to the beautiful in a further and more complex phase of aesthetic appearance, viz. the comic. As I understand Rosenkranz, therefore, the comic, though akin to the beautiful, does not form a species of it, but is rather a continuation of its principle in a new shape, after the rebellion of the ugly has been overcome. There is an obvious analogy between these ideas and those of Solger. The philosopher's chief interest is still concentrated on the ugly as given in natural opposition to the beautiful, and not on the qualities within the acknowledged beautiful
Ugliness as
i-
The title of
mon.
gjr
Ugliness,^ indicates his
which exhibit an
taken to be ugly.
the
affinity
between
it
and what
is
commonly
Our
mode
in
which
principal concern, therefore, is with positive negation is here conceived, as

;
tending to limit the sphere of the most genuine ugliness with the very remarkable ground on which ugliness is after all admitted within the frontiers of fine art and with the use made throughout of the notions of negation and contrariety, which is typical for the whole range of post- Hegelian dialectic. The .Esthetic of ugliness follows a course analogous to the Esthetic of beauty. Ugliness, ' as the negation of beauty,
;
Aesthetik des Hdsslichen, 1853.
A. A.
d.
d.
H., p. 7. H., p. 167,
cf.
p. 63.
D D
402
must be the positive perversion of the sublime (into the mean or commonplace, " gemein"), of the pleasing i^' gefdllig" into
the repugnant,
caricature).
" widrig"), or of the simply beautiful (into thus, although defective form and want of natural or historical truth ("Formlessness" and "Incorrectness ") are lower grades in which the tendency to ugliness reveals itself, yet true or real ugliness is not attained until in a being capable of freedom we find the attribute of un-freedom positively manifested in the place which freedom should hold.^ The tendency of this view, although allowance is made for the application of such ideas by analogy to unconscious objects, is of course to restrict the range of real ugliness to man and
And
art.''
It is remarkable how little the de facto kinship of so-called ugliness and familiar beauty has down to this time struck the perception of sesthetic theorists with the exception of Hegel and Goethe. The sublime has indeed at last come to be ranked as a species of the beautiful,' which is a great advance on the theory of Kant. But on the whole Rosenkranz contemplates the task before him as a descent into " the hell of the world of beauty,"* a desolate and miserable region, and seems to have no feeling for the pervading elements of force, depth, splendour and grace, within the strange, the tragic, and the terrible, which unmistakably and beyond dispute carry some qualities of the simplest beauty, often in the highest perfection, through much of the sphere in which ugliness reigns for the commonplace observer. do not feel, with him, that it is a painful and almost perilous adventure to enter into the infernal world of Dante [and of Milton ?], of Orcagna and Michael Angelo, of Spohr [and of Berlioz ?]. I throw the blame of his attitude in these respects partly on the aesthetic conditions of the early nineteenth century, partly on the tradidition of Winckelmann's " ideal," which, like every tradition,
We
P. 167. "The ugliest ugliness is not that which disgusts us in objects of P. 4. nature, in the swamp, the distorted tree, in toads and reptiles, goggle-eyed fish monsters, and massive pachyderms, in rats and monkeys [I do not admit the view of real ugliness implied in this enumeration] ; it is the egoism which reveals its madness in malicious and frivolous gesture, in the furrows drawn by
2
passion, in the shifty look of the eye, and in crime." delight of a corrupt age in depraved art. s P. 167. * P. 3-
Cf. p. 53,
on the morbid
THE "foil" theory.
403
seemed necessary
rapidly lost the depth and vitality of its founder's ideas. It to indicate this deep-seated quality of the author's feeling, although I am about to show that he makes
an important step towards the recognition of this very affinity against which he was so strongly biassed.
ii. The " ugliest ugliness," of which I spoke above, includes the ugliness of ^xt, i.e. ugly or bad art. But especially to a thinker for whom the ugly is so prominent a fact as it is for Rosenkranz, there is also an inevitable question concerning the ugly in art. This question he meets with candour and insight, thougli in doing so he raises a contradiction fatal to the unity of his own doctrine. Starting from the assumption, which in the sense implied is more than doubtful, that art arises from the yearning after pure unmixed beauty,^ he asks the obvious question " Is it not, then, the sharpest contradiction when we see art reproducing the ugly as well as the beautiful } " And if we reply that it reproduces the ugly only as beautiful, has this any result except to pile up a second contradiction on the top of the
Ugliness In
^^
first ?
The first answer which presents itself, that the ugly is admitted into art only as a foil that heightens the beautiful, and therefore for the sake of beauty and not in its own right, Rosenkranz rejects, justly, though not perhaps on the true ground. For he regards beauty as something distinct, positive, and independent, and therefore refuses to consider it as in need of any foil or dark background. No doubt this view has a relative truth in so far as beauty is positive and rea/ ugliness is negative. But it rests too much on a supposed separateness and purity of the beautiful, treating it always as something obvious and given, incapable of strangeness and difficulty, and not demanding any special effort or capacity to penetrate its depths and disguises. The truer reason, that what commonplace perception views as ugly is often far too prominent in the noblest art, and too deeply imbued with undeniable qualities of beauty, to be explained as a mere foil for beautiful elements distinct from itself, seems hardly to have been within the scope of Rosenkranz's eesthetic judgment or analysis. But it was something gained to be rid of the " foil theory, for any reason whatever.
1
P. 35.
P. 36.
404
HISTORY OF ^STHETJC.
cance.
suggests is of great signifinot to represent the idea in a merely oneThe pure ideals sided way, it cannot dispense with the ugly. exhibit to us no doubt the most important, that is, the positive element of the beautiful but if mind and nature are to be admitted to presentation in their full dramatic depth, then the ugly of nature, and the evil and diabolic, must not be omitted. The Greeks, however much they lived in the ideal, ^ had nevertheless their Hekatoncheires, Cyclopes, Satyrs, Graise, Empusae, Harpies, Chimseras they had a lame god, and represented in their tragedies the most horrible crimes {e.g. in the CEdipus and the Oresteia), madness (in the Ajax), nauseating diseases (in the Philoctetes), and in their comedy, vices and infamies of all kinds. Moreover, along with the Christian religion, as that which teaches men to know evil in its root and overcome it fundamentally, the ugly is finally and in principle introduced into the world of art. For this reason therefore, in order to depict the concrete manifestation of the idea in its totality, art cannot omit the portrayal of the ugly. Its apprehension of the idea would be superficial if it tried to limit itself to simple beauty!' Does the so-called ugly, we then naturally ask, undergo any modification when it presents itself in art ? Rosenkranz gives a twofold answer. In the first place what is ugly cannot have independent existence in art. Though it is false that beauty needs a foil, it is true that ugliness does. The ugly old woman whom painters place beside Danae could not be the subject of a separate picture, except either in genre-painting, when the situation gives the aesthetic interest, or as a portrait, which is primarily concerned with historical correctness.' I take it that these exceptions, in their context, are startling to our judgment. Of course the example is the author's, and if we are to understand it as ex hypothesi a case of ugliness insuperable by art, the question falls to the ground. But a few pages before * he has referred to the same figure as a " wrinkled, sharp-chinned old woman. Does he mean that every figure with marked signs of extreme old age is incapable of beauty, and that good genre and portrait-painting fall outside beautiful art except in as far as they happen to deal with youthful and graceful
" If ^ art
is
; ;
The second answer which he
P. 38.
See
p.
14 supra.
P. 40.
P. 36.
IDEALIZATION OF THE UGLY.

subjects
?
405
mean something of this shows himself to be on a lowlevel of aesthetic insight. But there are cases in which real ugliness the perversion of characteristic function has been introduced into art by great masters, and of these the author's theory is true. He gives well-known examples from Paul Veronese's Marriage in Cana. And he also instances the
I
believe that he does

far
kind in the main, and so
dissonance, which, as dissonance presupposes musical sound (a true dissonance can hardly be recognised in natural noises), may be taken as having an element of artificial or intentional perversion which causes them to verge upon real ugliness. Such actual perversions, or contradictions usurping the place of characterization, do seem to demand a quantitative subordination, or submergence in a mass of beauty, and cannot be made independent objects of art by any force or depth of presentation. I take it that music could not be made with nothing but discord, nor could the nauseating details introduced by Veronese in the Marriage in Cana be the So far Rosenkranz seems subjects of independent pictures. on firm ground. Our complaint of him is not that he denies independent aesthetic value to the extreme perversions in art, but that he does not appear to distinguish them with certainty from the incomparably greater range of the quaintly, rudely, grotesquely, terribly or intricately characteristic, all of which passes in common parlance as ugly. His second answer has deeper import. The ugly, he says, when it appears in art, must not indeed be beautified, for this would be to intensify its hideousness by adding fraud to rebut yet it must be " idealized " by subjection to the bellion general laws of beauty, for example to the laws of symmetry, harmony, proportion, and force of individual expression.' The result of such idealization is not to soften or disguise its ugliliness, but just the reverse, namely to accent its characteristic and essential lineaments.*. But yet in doing so there must Unessential matters of arise a certain negative consequence. painful or sickening detail are crushed out, just as in the representation of commonplace beauty unessential fascinations It is not the desire for fraudulent palliation, are crushed out. but the despotism of the fundamental meaning, that operates
;
phenomena of
with this
effect.
P. 44.
^ P. 43-
406
It is plain that we have here a strange intermediate posiThree suggestions force tion assigned to the ugly in art.
themselves upon us in consequence. a. If, as we have maintained throughout, the aesthetic perception of nature differs only in degree from the aesthetic perception which is art, must not the same reservations be read back into the doctrine of ugliness in nature, which are here applied to the ugly as it appears in art ? b. The province of apparent ugliness or of what we might call the difficult in beauty, which hardly fulfils the author's definition of ugliness but appears to be excluded by him from the beautiful, is thus nearly reconciled with the beautiful in substance though not in name for when idealized in the sense required it would simply resolve itself into cases of the characteristic beautiful subject to the laws of abstract or formal expression, in virtue of which latter, through assuming strong and significant form and structure, it becomes pleasing even to the decorative sense. c. It must even be doubted whether ugliness according to the author's definition, the positive negation of beauty, can submit to the idealization he describes without being undone as ugliness and presented as beauty. contradiction, confessed and explained, is no longer a contradiction and the perversion of character or individuality revealed and stigmatised in its true light and relations, ceases to be a positive
;
perversion.
The
essential distinction is that
which Rosen-
kranz seems to have firmly grasped, between idealization as intensifying the lineaments of perversion and emphasizing their core and essence in vigorous presentation, and idealization as fraudulently softening and disguising their character by causing them to approximate to a type of beauty, in which, whether in another sense beautiful or no, they cannot possibly have any share. This all-important distinction will occupy us again.
The ronns
of Opposition.
iiiword remains to be said upon the forms Qf opposition by which the entire discussion is
determined.
Ugliness,
we
saw,
is
the negation
of beauty,
or,
as nega-
no sensuous form, we prefer to call it the perversion of beauty, whose constituent elements are perverted
*
tion per se can take
" Negation" ox " Negatm-Schdnes" y^.
7, 10,
61.
FALSEHOOD AND NEGATION.

{verkekrte) in
it.
407
term " opposite " (" Gegensatz " or "Gegentheil"^ by which he often describes the relation between the qualities forming an antithetical pair, is a veryappropriate term for positive negations or perversions in their relation to one another, but it is not a term which explains itself apart from a complete exposition of the nature of the series or classification in which it is employed. And accordingly we find an almost ludicrous confusion in the usage of these terms by the sesthetic writers with whom Rosenkranz deals. Thus " the true opposite {" Gegensatz ") of the sublime is not the ugly as Ruge and K. Fischer say, nor the comic, as Vischer thinks, but the pleasing {" gefdllige")." The first thing then that Rosenkranz has in his mind is that the negative opposition in which each form of the ugly stands to its corresponding form of the beautiful must be distinguished from the "positive opposition" in which each species ^ of the beautiful stands to one or more of the others. This is a step towards clearness, but needs further elucidation. All definite opposition is between positives negatively
'
Now the
related,
and these
epithets, " positive "
and " negative," mark
distinction prima facie between kinds of opposition. Strictly speaking, opposition can only arise between judgments, for any two given contents are simply different, and
no
only become opposed in as far as they may be considered to be candidates for the same place. Moreover, it must be noted that all common logical opposition is interchangeable that is to say, when B is the opposite or negation of A, then is also and in the same sense the opposite or negation of B. If the one is, then the other is not but we are not informed, by the mere fact of opposition, which is to stand and which is to must beware of confusing falsehood and negation. fall. No ordinary logical symbols or technical terms will represent must therefore state falsehood or confusion of relations. the whole matter more distinctly. In the first place the beautiful and the ugly seem to be regarded as two co-ordinate genera under the conception aesthetic, which genera are so related that to every species of the one there corresponds a species of the other formed by a false attribution of elements present in the former species. But if so, while no doubt it is the case that logically speaking
;
We
We
P. 61.
* P. 63, see
above
p.
402 for these species.
408
the beautiful is a positive opposite of the ugly, just as the ugly is of the beautiful, yet this purely logical relation, being interchangeable, does not adequately describe their connection. must therefore understand that the one genus is represented by some such symbol as " is x y," the other by a symbol involving self-contradiction such as " is x^ y" which really belong to A and not to A. Granting this explanation, we then have two sets of " oppositions " the opposition between each form of the true series and the corresponding form of the false series, and the oppositions between the different terms of the true series (disregarding those between the different terms of the false series). Now in the former case, the terms being given in pairs, it is possible to speak of " the opposite " of any given term, although it may not be selfevident where this opposite is to be found, that is, how the pairs of terms are to be arranged, and it is also possible that one term may have two or more opposites, even though its peculiar counterpart is its opposite par excellence. In fact, Rosenkranz opposes the sublime to the petty, mean or frivolous, whereas I should have primarily opposed it to the false sublime the portentous, monstrous, or exaggerated. No doubt in different senses it may be " opposite " to either of these species of the ugly, to the latter, I should have said, in the stricter sense, as that which arises by mistake out of the sublime itself, to the former no doubt as to something very far removed from the nature of the sublime, being in fact as I think the true opposite of the pleasing or pretty, which is for Rosenkranz the opposite par excellence of the sublime in the beautiful series. For we must consider also the opposition between the forms of the beautiful. Now these are ex hypothesi a series comprising three or more types, which may be multiplied at pleasure by refinement of analysis. Therefore there is no meaning in speaking of the " opposite " of any form within the series unless and until we determine what we mean by opposition /ar excellence within such a series. Rosenkranz seems to take it that according to an old definition the opposites are the most divergent species under the same genus, and so opposes the sublime to the pleasing. But plainly the whole thing is a question of degree, and if there is to be a "simple beautiful" a conception which I view with some suspicion the sublime must certainly be opposed to it. No
We
A
;
IDEAL- REALISM.
4O9
doubt Rosenkranz is influenced by remoteness in opposing the sublime to the petty in ugliness, just as in opposing it to the pleasing in beauty. But it seems that, as between beauty and ugliness, the only security for any approach to an objective classification is to pair off the genuine form with the form which represents a mistaken feeling for that genuine form, and, as between the forms of beauty, there is little use in speaking of pairs of opposites par excellence, the important matter being to establish a fairly representative series, from which the kinds and degrees of opposition can then be read off with genuine significance. The later oujeoincluding under the term "Objective 3. In aveideauam. Idealism" the views of Carriere, Schasler and Hartmann, I am not following the phraseology of these writers
themselves. Carriere designates his own standpoint as that of Ideal-Realism,^ and Schasler* accepts this same term, or " the synthesis of Idealism and Realism," as the description of his aesthetic principle. Hartmann includes the views of these two writers with those of Hegel, Vischer, and others under the title of concrete idealism, which he also claims for his own theory. He assigns to Schelling, Schopenhauer, Solger, Weisse, and Lotze, the position of abstract idealists, from their common tendency to speak in a pseudo-Platonic manner (which Hartmann takes to be genuinely Platonic ^) of a super-sensuous world of ideas or patterns by approximation to which and in no other way the sensuous world possesses beauty. It is an essentially true remark * of Hartmann, though not literally correct, when in justifying his distinction between the abstract and the concrete idealists, he urges that the Idea of Beauty {"Idee der Schonheit") of which Weisse and Lotze constantly speak, could have For according to him absolutely no meaning for Hegel. " the idea " or concrete world-movement becomes beautiful when expressed to sense-perception or fancy, and in this aspect may be called the " ideal " or perhaps for the sake of brevity " the beautiful " but Hegel could never speak of the idea of beauty in the sense of a beauty which existed as a super-sensuous idea.* Of course again the conception or
;
3
6
^ K. G. d. A., pp. 11 25 and 1132. ^sth., ii.. Preface. * A., i. 93 footnote. A., L, Pref. vii. Hegel, A., i. 135 and 141, where in fact the term " Idee des
Schonen"
4IO
notion
ferent
of beauty employed in aesthetic science is quite diffrom an abstract idea with which beauty could be
identified.
But I have no doubt that Schelling, though he fell into abstract idealism in later years, was next to Schiller and by an advance upon Kant the founder of the view that beauty is the presentation of the inmost law of things to sense and fancy, and for our purpose it will be simplest to omit the
degrees of abstract and concrete idealism, and to select a term which indicates the bona fide endeavour to find beauty in the reasonableness of the world displayed to sense. All who have genuinely attempted this may fairly be called objective idealists The divergence into abstract monism which in aesthetic. ex hypothesi must be dualism or into abstract idealism, is in some degree a matter of defective philosophical expression or of over-reliance on emphatic metaphor, and is a confusion that partly in appearance and partly in reality has beset the very greatest philosophers, including, as is too well known,
even Plato himself. " I deal- Realism" on the other hand expresses a history or a problem rather than a theory or a solution. It indicates a combination of two views which have respectively no philosophical meaning except as universal and exclusive. As it stands, therefore, it indicates mere eclecticism. But its intention is divined and embodied in the phrase objective
idealism.
"' Carriere published his Esthetic in 1859. Before the appearance of the third edition in 1886 he had supplemented it by the splendidly conceived work in five volumes (first edition, 1862 third edition, 1886), Art in the Context of the Evolution of Culture, and the Ideals of Humanity,^ on which I have already drawn in speaking of Christian art in its first beginnings. Carriere does not make any notable advance in matters of principle. Three points may be mentioned on which, whether for good or evil, his views are significant.
carriere.
;
does occur, give an absolute justification of Hartmann's meaning. "We called (1. c, p. 135) the beautiful the Idea of the beautiful. This means that the beautiful itself is to be apprehended as Idea, and that as particularised Idea, viz. as Ideal," i.e., " the sensuous show of the Idea," p. 141.
1
Die Kunst
in
Zusammenhange
d.
Cultur-entwickelung
u.
d.
Ideate d,
Menschhdt.
UGLINESS "OVERCOME.
411
H^ ^^Îs the full importance of Weisse's and ^Rosenkranz's treatment of the ugly. He himself stands on this question between the old and new, and although never thoroughly precise and scientific in his expression, appears to apprehend the essence of the question more justly than the later thinkers. It might be doubted, however, whether he sees the full reasons for the view which they
The Ugly.
adopt.
He attacks Weisse's dialectic progression from the sublime through the ugly to the comic,^ absolutely refusing to conceive of the ugly as a kind of the beautiful. In the latest edition of his work he is able to comment upon Schasler, whose view, shared by Hartmann, that the ugly is an essential element in the characteristic and therefore in the beautiful, he no less decidedly rejects. The free* and the individual we must have in beauty, but not the ugly, which is the falsely free
this doctrine, with agree. On the place of ugliness in art, however, Carriere agrees with Rosenkranz. For the sake of completeness it must be admitted,^ but only either as idealized or as subordinated. It is to be noted that in these ways the ugly is said to be " overcome," and in its idealization its " repulsiveness " is destroyed.
I
and individual. I which in substance
shall return later to
the case of a noble expression in features that are is counted under this head, and unidealized ugliness that which cannot stand alone is yet to submit to the laws of the composition in which it is introduced. In all this there is a degree of vacillation which shows that the limits of "simple beauty" are becoming uncertain, and that the admission of the ugly into art will ultimately resolve itself into an extension of the frontier of beauty. iJ. Carriere arrives* at the same general arrangeDivision of the ^^*ment of the arts which Hegel proposed, and towards which, for different reasons and with many varieties of minor detail, aesthetic theory appears to be gravitating. He starts from the distinction of co-existence in space and succession in time, and their combination in the movement of a life and reality that has co-existence as well as succession. These three principles are taken to correspond to the " three arts " of Within each of these " three form, of music, and of poetry.
Even
normally ugly
1 A.,
i.
147.
2 75.^
148.
lb., 159, cf.
162-3.
^>';
'
625-6.
412
arts " there
HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC,
In the " art " of forn is again a triple distinction. Architecture corresponds to inorganic matter, Sculpture tc organic individual shape, and painting to the combination o the two in individual life. Music is divided as instrumental vocal, and the combination of the two poetry into epic, lyric and dramatic. The distinctions of "inner perception," according as its object is mind in general, personality as a whole, and personality in its particular relations with other persons, have to do duty as the basis of division alike for music and
;
for poetry.
triads thus established within music and poetry appear both cases to rest on distinctions which reverse the order of development, and in the case of music also reverse the order of artistic scope and capacity. Hegel, though separated from the date of Carriere's third edition by more than half a century, during which a completely new appreciation of music has grown up, yet rightly places pure instrumental music as the higher or completer development in comparison with "accompanying" music. Wagner is responsible for a tendency towards art-combinations in the later writers, and perhaps also in Carriere. iiiThe larger work on. Art in its Connection Attitude to the Renaissance, ^{i^, Culture, etc., displays in many ways a mor^ genuine conception of aesthetic science than the abstract systems, including Carriere's own, which I have ventured to
in
The
characterize as scholastic. content-theory and objective idealism is essentially a content-theory must at least indicate its relations with the evolution of the content to which it refers, and as I have already observed, we do not obtain this content in the recorded opinions of philosophers, but only from the history of art and civilization. It might, however, be possible to indicate these relations without undertaking so colossal a task as that of combining a history of civilization with a history of art, so that after all the critical points of the latter hardly receive the attention which is their due. It has been said ^ that the historical division of forms of art upon which this work is founded, into oriental, classical, mediaeval, renaissance, and modern, is a great advance upon all previous divisions of the kind. I doubt, however, whether there is an essential difference between this and Hegel's
By Hartmann,
A.,
i.
247.
THE AGES OF ART.

division, except in as far as
413
was a necessary supplement
and the
modern
art is recognised
this
is
renaissance period
distinguished from the mediaeval in a way which indicates an antiquated view of the renaissance. But in fact Carriere only makes these subdivisions within a wider framework ^ by which the Avhole period from the Christian era to the close of the renaissance is thrown into one, under the name of the age of feeling {GemUth) in opposition to the early oriental and classical Greek periods, united within the "age of nature," and to the modern time, from the eighteenth century onwards, as "the age of mind." Thus the essential unity of Christian art is recognised, though the late development of music is not very appropriate to the distinction between the age of feeling, to which the classical time of music should surely belong, and the "modern" age of mind. The difference between oriental art and that of classical Greece is represented, not altogether falsely, by a distinction of degrees of perfection within the " age of nature." It might be suggested as a simpler and more natural arrangement to start from the distinction of classical, as corresponding to a natural monism, romantic as corresponding to a dualism of sense and spirit, full of tension arising from the effort to bring them together or merge the one in the other, and modern as corresponding to a comparatively monistic attitude at a higher level than that of Greece, the " two worlds having come together in the concrete import of one. The " symbolic " art of Hegel would then appear as a preface or introduction as an essay, essentially imperfect, towards the beauty which realized itself in classical Greece. The parallelism, which Hartmann suggests, between the relation ^ of symbolic to classical, and mediaeval to renaissance, would falsify the whole construction. In any such analogy the second pair of terms would have to be not mediaeval and renaissance, But the reality of a modern but Christian and modern. art-period, unless we extend its further limit to include Shakespeare whom no dualism seems to affect, is a question which does not trouble Carriere as much as it ought. Let us grant that the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a new and splendid phenomenon in the history of art ; yet in relying upon this we are ipso facto admitting a
Die Kunst,
p. 2.
^.^
j.
252.
414
certain discontinuity with the older art-world.

not, with Carriere, take the generation of
And we
can-
Goethe and Schiller as an age of abundant poetic production having permanent value. Moreover the well-known peculiarities of nineteenthcentury achievement in art, however magnificent it may have
in isolated instances, are such as to make us think twice before accepting a "modern" art-age, beginning with the eighteenth century, as anything more than a problem and a hope. I suspect that the true line of division will be found to fall in the sixteenth century, Shakespeare marking a singularly fortunate transition, and Rubens and Rembrandt the beginning of a new period. ^' '^^'^^^'^' ^ Critical HistoTy of y^sthetic, A&'dAr schasier cated to Rosenkranz, appeared in 1869. It is an immense, but very fresh and readable work, filling 1,200 pages. It was intended to be the basis of an aesthetic system, and is called "Part I.," but a Part II. commensurate with it has never appeared, its place being taken by The System of the Arts, 1882, and an '' /Esthetic" or outline of the Science of Beauty and Art in 1886. These are works of the size and 'class of our University Extension manuals, and do not add much of importance to the views suggested in the Critical History. The object-matter of the science has here come off second-best in the division of labour that characterizes the later idealism.
been
Conceptions indicated ty the" History."
'
^'^^
^^
observations
made above upon
the
later post- Hegelian writers in general, hold espe , n t! rî lt r S cially true of this history. Its aim is to furnish the
foundation of a theory of aesthetic, and there is no reason to deny its value for this purpose if we clearly understand of what kind that value must be. The " dialectic," for example, which is here exhibited in the progress of philosophic thought from Plato to Hegel, is the dialectic of a branch of the history of philosophy, not the dialectic or cumulative progress of a kind of apperception in the human intelligence. The two are connected, and Schasier uses the former to elucidate the latter. But we are not here dealing at first hand with the causes and nature of changes in aesthetic perception, as we are in Winckelmann, Schelling, Schiller, Hegel and in Carriere's larger work. This attribute pervades the whole theory. are to watch, so Schasier tells us, by means of the critical history,
critical
We
CRITICISM OF SCHASLER.
415
the intellectual genesis of the aesthetic consciousness.^ But granting that he enables us to do this, what is the nature of the outcome ? see, no doubt, how the aesthetic consciousness, as a philosophical analysis of the beautiful, draws nearer and nearer to completeness. But we are saddened to find that as this takes place the aesthetic consciousness, as the creative and perceptive enjoyment of beauty, becomes doubtful and disturbed. "The modern artist,* by reason of the inherent need of reflexion, has for ever forfeited the full and free possession of the artist-paradise." are looking at the genesis of a philosophy, hut. pari passu, we may think, at the decay of an art-world. The question is not at present how far this may be true, but how far the intellectual process which is thus primd facie separable from the art-process is of value as an introduction to the study of the latter. The change of emphasis from aesthetic to philosophical evolution may probably indicate some degree of confusion in the author's view. If he means that the true aim of art is only coming into sight as beauty for beauty's sake becomes an explicit purpose, he commits a very serious blunder, and inverts the relations of the art-ages of the world. But so again the " Ideal-Realism " which is for him the result of the whole evolution, is not a principle or property of art or beauty, but a method of aesthetic science*' Realism for him indicates, historically speaking, what we have called "exact aesthetic," the aesthetic of Herbart and Schopenhauer. It has no connection with Realism or Naturalism in art as we
We
We
understand it to-day. In order to strengthen my grounds for differing sharply and widely from so gifted and eminent a writer as the author of the critical history, I feel bound to add to some comments which I have already passed upon a kind of hastiness and perversity that I find in him, another indication of a careless
or biassed procedure. He has an aesthetic theory of colour of his own,* founded upon the theories of Goethe, which he maintains, though
^ 2
K.G.d.A.,\.^\.
Jb.,
i.
xxxii.
i.
See Hartmann,
248.
His criticism here seems
perfectly just.
Schasler's
" realism " in fact means Induction. * ^sth., i., 78 ; see K. G.d.A. i. 495.
41
some modification, to be thoroughly justified a If such ideas were scarcel) against the Newtonian analysis. pardonable in Hegel more than fifty years before, what is tc be said of them in a writer for whom not even national bias could any longer be an excuse ? I do not complain that he is unacquainted with the work of English physicists, but surely he might have studied Helmholtz.^
needing
1 The weak point of his theory on purely aesthetic ground is that the suggestion of warmth in colour, on the unequal combination of which with luminosity he lays stress in determining the aesthetic character of colours, cannot be directly obtained as he assumes, from the actual heating powers of the various coloured rays. More complex suggestions than this must be brought in. In any case it is hopeless to suppose that anything more can be done for aesthetic with Goethe's theory than with the accepted anaJysis. See Helm-
holtz, Lectures,
I
may
i. 29. insert here two
to
be treated in the
accuracy.
text,
kindred points, which are not of sufficient importance though they bear strongly on the question of judg-
ment and
and without a reference, one or other, I cannot which, of the familiar passages in which Hegel alludes, with a passing tinge of irony, to the use of the term " philosophy " in England. The passages are Gesch. d. Philosophie, i. 37, and (ôxtex) Logic, p. 13 (E. Tr. Wallace, p. 11), and though too long to extract they are worth turning up in comparison with Schasler, p. 1158, if we want to measure the difference between a great mind and a critic in search of an ill-natured joke. Hegel's interest is in both cases serious. In one he quotes from the practice of German universities a trace of the ancient meaning of "philosophy," the survival of which he is noting in England. And both passages end with an observation, plainly aimed at the public familiar to him, to the effect that in England philosophy is at least a name for something that people value. More closely bearing on our subject is another extravagance of our author. In quoting Dickens' Hard Times for the sake of its attack upon English " common sense," he altogether fails to discern that, just and good as are in many ways the ideas of that delightful story, yet on the specifically aesthetic question of fact and fancy Dickens is attacking his own side and the principles which are the source of all that is greatest in his own and every other art. This phenomenon will surprise no student. The typical scene of Hard Times on this point is the school scene which parodies an inspector's attempt to bring home to the children the relation of imagination to reality. In 1856, the year in which the novel appeared, there appeared also the 4th edition of the 2nd vol. of the Modem Painters, containing an account of the Penetrative Imagination, and the first edition of the 4th vol. containing (p. 331) the words, " Be assured of the great truth what is impossible in reality is ridicI hold no brief for the Science and Art Department. ulous in fancy." But it is absolutely plain that the movement, going all know its defects. back to 183s, in which it originated, was a form of the movement for a return to nature and life in education, with which Dickens, if he had understood its real scope, would have heartily sympathised.
cites quite incorrectly,
tell
He
We
THE UGLY AS A STIMULUS.
417
States his theory of ugliness ex."' Schasler ugunesB and "^^^lônôtplicitly in the yEsiketic,^ referring, at the same time, to passages in the History, to which, in principle, his later exposition adds nothing. Starting from the researches of Rosenkranz, and agreeing with him so far as concerns the position of ugliness outside the world of art and beauty, and corresponding to it phase for phase, he also acquiesces in the traditional view as to the
wide range of the ugly in the works of nature. But he attempts to strike out a new principle in dealing with ugliness where it enters, or is absorbed in, the sphere of art. The ugliness, indeed, of bad or false art, a case on which Schasler well insists, falls under the first-mentioned head of ugliness outside true art, of which it is the strongest example. In regard to it, therefore, we have no more to say, except to indicate here and there in passing how it is supposed to arise by the derangement of relations within genuine art. It is with reference to the ugly within the beautiful that Schasler has a new view to propound. The ugly, he believes, essentially enters into all beauty whatever; and more than this, is the active element or dialectic negation by which aesthetic interest is impelled to the creation of definite or characteristic beauty in its various forms. I find it difficult to explain this view further, without entering upon a criticism of it. This it is more convenient to defer till
the same as comparison, however, of the ugly to the negative, reiterated allusions to the lines in Faust which attribute creative impulse to the Spirit that denies, and repeated comparisons of the ugly with the false and the wicked as essential manifestations of freedom and therefore not to be held deplorable phenomena, give us some clue to the author's meaning. He distinctly denies the view of Rosenkranz, that in entering into art, as demanded by the " idea " for the sake of completeness, the ugly remains ugly. On the contrary, qtid an element in the characteristic, it is absorbed in the special and definite form of beauty which has in each case arisen in consequence of the stimulus that it gave. The contrast of masculine and feminine beauty is always in
in
Hartmann's ideas, which are Schasler's, are also before us.
principle
The
1 Pp. 1036-8.
19-24 referring to the K.G.d.A., pp. 795, 763, 1021-4, 1028,
E E
41
Schasler's mind. He feels that such sharply opposed forms of the beautiful contain elements which a little dislocation would make ugly. And he is confident, and with justice, that such sharply antagonistic forms there are and ought to be, and that for example the ideal of a human type in which sexual differences should disappear, favoured by some late
Greek
art
and by Winckelmann,
is
a wholly
false ideal.
He
points out that the characteristic qualities or features of either sex, if transferred as primary characteristics to the other sex,
would at once become
ugly.
thus obviously relying on the undeniable and important fact that the positive modifications of beauty, such as the sublime and the graceful, are negatively related to each other. He also thinks that the works of nature, as normally perceived (this condition may save the truth of his view), are widely and generally defective in beauty. He appears then to be inferring that the selection and characterization of definite content in suitable form by art or aesthetic perception is, to begin with, stimulated by defect of beauty in that which by immediate presentation suggests this idealizing process. And further, he maintains, if 1 understand him rightly, that the characteristic creation so produced, is by its exclusive or special characterization (as of sublimity, austerity, or the like), ipso facto forfeiting some elements of the beautiful which are accessible both to a more simple and also to a co-ordinate type of beauty. Thus both by " concretion " against the abstract, and by divergence against the equally concrete, ugliness asserts itself as a factor, but a latent or absorbed factor, in the degrees and types of beauty. The only modifications of beauty which Schasler recognises are the sublime and the graceful. These divisions plainly correspond, as Cicero pointed out, to masculine and feminine beauty. It may not be worth while to subdivide the content further, but it would be easy to do so, and Hartmann does it in great detail. The above theory of ugliness is suggestive, and undoubtedly opens the way for larger ideas of beauty, by definitely giving the characteristic its place as the central fact of beautiful expression. I shall criticise it in treating of Hartmann. The beauty of art passes over into ugliness either by a confusion between two phases of beauty such as the sublime and the graceful,^ or by the intensification of some characteristic
is
1 As Schasler says K. G. d. A., 1022 of the father of gods and men represented as dancing in Offenbach's Orpheus, " the gracefuUer, the uglier."
He
THE DOUBLE AND TRIPLE

till it
DIVISIONS.
419
destroys the
and becomes
caricature.
the false sublime,
harmony of the system to which it belongs Thus the monstrous or horrible is and so on. Such are the points at which the
and invincible
latent ugliness within art passes into actual
ugliness outside art

Tie Classification
of the Arts,
iii-
"
As
regards' the principle of division to
^g yggjj j^ classifying the arts, it need here only be remarked that the author, in fundamental contrast with all the above-named writers on aesthetic (Hegel, Weisse, and Vischer), bases it on the simple antithesis of resi and motion an antithesis which of course can also be regarded as that of Matter and Mind,' or Material and Form,' or ^ Space and Time,' but, more carefully considered, lies at the root of all these antitheses. Now on this antithesis the author founds an arrangement of the arts as a strictly articulated double series, whose corresponding terms form a coherent If Hegel, Weisse, and Vischer found themselves parallelism. obliged to assume a triple arrangement, and carried it out, each of them in a quite different way, but with the greatest show of consistency, by help of the dialectic method which herein displayed a really admirable elasticity it seems that these thinkers were chiefly forced to their conclusion by a fatal gap in the parallelism, which with every effort they were unable
; ' '
It is obvious, that is to say, that if, like the naive to fill. ancients, we arrange the arts according to their means of presentation and organs of perception, and designate one group as arts of the eye (Architecture, Sculpture, Painting), and the other group as 'arts of the ear' (Music, Poetry), it is possible to co-ordinate the two series, so that music corresponds
' '
to architecture, and poetry to painting but then there seems to be no kind of art on the other side corresponding to sculpture and comparable with it. This fatal gap was an awkward blot in the system, the true articulation of which was other;
wise plain."
later from the development of the printhe author has adhered to the double arrangeciple of division, ment as the only rational and natural one and what prinbesides the inner necessity cipally urged him to this course was the fact that in the triple division no room of the notion was to be found for a very essential grade in the solution of
"
As
will
be seen
K. G.
d. A.,
i.
XXV. (Preface).
420
the notion of beauty, viz. the mimic rhythm of the moving form. For if, with Schlegel, we consent to designate architecture as frozen music, we might with far more justice designate sculpture as the frozen mimicry of form, or the dance (pantomimic representation, of course not in a comic sense), as unfrozen sculpture." This division involves at first sight two principles,^ one the principle of simultaneity and succession which distinguishes the two series from one another, and the other, specifically stated in the System d. Kiinste, the principle of increasing difference in weight {"Gewicht,"^ predominance or importance), of material and idea, which distinguishes the several arts within each of the series. These two principles Schasler reduces to one by a lax argumentation identifying both of them with the antithesis of rest and motion, which embodies as he thinksthe essence of the whole set of antitheses, " Matter and
Force Material and Shape Nature and Mind." * The " reduction" of these profound antitheses to one of their most external and abstract results is a bad point of departure for the appreciation of the concrete value of the fine arts. On this classification and its principle I make three observations.
The PaxaUeUsm.
I
a. The whole parallelism * appears fantastic. see no antecedent desirability in creating two series at all or in the correspondence of arts which Schasler thinks essen-
Discussed in Schasler's System d. Kiinste, p. 236. In distinguishing sculpture from painting he seriously means weight, (" Schwere," System d. K., p. 80). There is therefore an equivocation in the use of the word " Gewicht " all the more objectionable that a certain meaning in the phrase can be detected, and would have repaid explanation.
*
S. d.
* I
K., p. 256. subjoin Schasler's scheme as printed p. 124 of the System d. Kiinste.
I.
Kunste der
Hauptgruppe: " simultanen " Perception
II.
:
Hauptgruppe
:
Kiinste der "successiven" Perception a) Productive : b) Re-productive

(Hilfs-)
I..
Architektur
Plastik
i.
2.
2.
'Landschaftsmalerei. subj. (Jenremalerei . . obj. 3. Malerei- Historienmalerei. . subj.

.
3.
^Virtuosenthum. MimikMimische Darstellung. Lyrik Deklamation. Poesie Epik Rhapsodik.

Musik
Dramatik
KUnste
Schauspielkunst.
obj.
FALSE CORRESPONDENCES.
421
tial. The only justification for the plan would be that some definite and essential relations were symbolized by the parallelism. In any case, no doubt there is something of a
break between painting and music. But must be traversed in a definite direction.
a break which help is got by throwing music wholly out of its historical position, which is also that taken by it on an impartial survey of its powers and tendencies, and beginning with it a new series in which the fact of the fresh beginning remains wholly unexplained in its
it
is
No
relation to the close of the other series.
The
distinction
by
eye and ear is broken down when mimic dancing is placed in the second group. The distinction by rest and motion is compatible with such an arrangement only in the most superficial sense. Motion is not the medium or element of this so-called art, but merely a modification by gesture of the human figure and inseparably attached to its spatial reality. The detailed correspondences are not less wild. No doubt the definite though very narrow resemblances between music and architecture were worth noting once for all. Neither of these arts is primarily imitative, and both depend largely on rhythmical intervals which can be numerically represented. But when this is said, all is said. The inseparable combination of time-relation and tone-relation which is, as I understand, the essence of melody, finds little or nothing in while the architecture to answer to the tone-relations of harmony and orchestration, which are but refinements in the subtlest colour-combinations faintly foreshadowed known to the painter's art, have nothing at all corresponding For if its coexistent rhythmical to them in architecture.
;
have already been compared to melody, they must not be used over again in a lax ct*mparison with harmony. On the other hand, the organic decorative form to which architecture presses forward finds no genuine analogy in Of the mimic dance in comparison with sculpture I music. The correlation of lyric, epic and will speak separately.
intervals
dramatic poetry, with landscape, genre and historical painting, Landscape paintcan only throw the reader into amazement.
demands the highest characteristic objectivity of expression, and only through this attains its measure of subjectivity. Lyric poetry does not demand and
ing, as
we know
to-day,
can hardly,
in spite of recent developments,
organized characteristic content.
receive a fullyGenre-painting, though good
422
in its place,
trifling
is,
HISTORY OF
-(ESTHETIC.
in
which is if in genuine art there is such a category at all (implying, as it seems to, a historical, i.e. non-sesthetic interest, instead of an sesthetic interest in the presentation of a content which happens to be suggested by history) involves a relation to Moreover, the unmere fact wholly alien to the drama.
criticised iriclusion of the three traditional types of
by Hegel, ^ essentially and cannot have the large and grand style While historical painting, the essential of the epos.
for the reason pointed out
scale,
poetry as
essential forms of art, in a place subsequent to music and correlative with painting, without the smallest indication that two out of the three have apparently ceased to exist, and the third is fundamentally changing its character, displays in a striking form the difficulties that attach to an entire dissociation of aesthetic
Tho Himie
oance.
b-
from the temporal evolution of beauty. About the mimic dance very little need be
sdiid, for Schasler all but confesses the absurdity of the position which he assigns it,^ which is not redeemed by the suggestion that it bears an epic character in contrast to the essentially lyrical character of music. I only desire to take the opportunity of pointing out a principle which appears to me to determine many questions with reference to the secondary arts, though it does not apply to the true decorative or " minor " arts. true sesthetic material, in which ideas or emotions are to be freely symbolized, is the better indeed for definite and peculiar properties, but must not have in itself any individualized organization. Such an organization cannot but collide with any expression, in producing which it is to be treated as mere material. Organisms and individuals are bad material for the artist In landscape gardening, as in acting or the to work with. mimic dance, there is a collision between the natural individual and the homogeneous unity demanded by the idea. The work cannot be made in one piece under the dominion In a lesser degree the same applies to objects of one spirit. represented as well as to the material of representation. Flowers, trees, animals are manageable in landscape, but represented for their own sake they impose their individuality on the artist, not having, like man, a complete spirituality of their own, yet refusing to be recast in the spirituality of his
In his defence of Dutch painting.
S. d. K., 105.
NEGLECT OF THE MATERIAL.
423
mood.
They remain, therefore, as a rule, more or less in the region of studies. Thus I hold it absurd in principle to speak of the mimic dance as fluid or unfrozen sculpture. In sculpture the whole form is re-created by a single spirit in a single homogeneous material. In acting or the mimic dance the individual is and remains a given natural form, which is determined first by nature and then by its own intelligence and feeling, and can never in principle, however great its capacities, begin to fulfil the condition of a homogeneous medium cast into a single form as the expression of a single idea. The approximation of the dance to an art is nearest where the lowest place, that of mere decorative combination, is claimed, and where the individual form does little, and is only a unit in a pleasing pattern of motions.' f. Another refinement has told with disastrous effect on Schasler's appreciation of a fundamental principle of artistic expression. The material of art, Schasler insists,^ is the marble or the paint ; the means or medium of In music representation is the perceived form and colour. and poetry, of course, material and medium all but coincide. But where they are separable the material tends to be omitted from consideration in favour of the medium even Schasler's reference to its weight, in his distinction of the arts, comes to lack justification, and Hartmann, accordingly, objects to it. Thus the whole range of considerations that attach to the feeling for material, and to the moulding of fancy by the habit of thinking in a certain material, are omitted.' No attention is paid to the " minor " arts, in which the differences of treatment spring obviously and directly from the differences of material, and from love and experience, for example, of the " metal," * as it is alive in the workman's
;
ment"
2
See above, p. 208, Hogarth's comparison of the " to a country dance.
stick
and ribbon orna-
S. d. K., ch. 2. " The form which it (the marble) possesses as a natural S. d. K., 60. substance, i.e. its external stratification and inner texture, has nothing to do If he had compared it with wood and with the form given it by sculpture." bronze he could never have said this. " * i.e. In this case the melted glass. W. Morris, " The Lesser Arts of Life on Art by Poole, Morris, and others, p. 196. " In the hands of in Lectures
*
a good workman the metal is positively him to make something pretty."
alive,
and
is,
you may
say,
coaxing
424
;
hands and thus the only true analogy for the classification of the "higher" arts is hopelessly lost. Yet eventhiough music and poetry the same relation persists. The musician thinks,
we are told, in the tones of particular instruments, and writes with the colour and feeling proper to each. Even the poet must have the feeling of a familiarity with his material, and his attempts and achievements cannot be the same in Greek
and Latin,
English.
1
in
Italian
and
in
German,
in
French and
in
am
confident that except through this recognition of the
workman's sympathy with his material, a recognition which Hegel in some degree possessed, and which recent English criticism has much more completely expounded, nothing solid and sane can be done in the classification of the arts. I have unavoidably laid stress on points in which I differ from Schasler. His very clearness and freshness of style
make
they are errors.
his errors glaring in the eyes of those But with all his prejudices
who
think that
and caprices he
stands on the true ground of modern aesthetic. is the first to accept the principle that elements which may readily become difficult and displeasing, are not only permissible but essential
He
and are so essential because of their being involved in that penetrating idealization which is the central attribute of the beautiful, and which is recognised by him in all its depth under the name of the characteristic.
in art,
Hartmann, who combines the conclusions of Schopenhauer with the substantive views of Hegel, and has attained a European popularity equalled among recent philosophers only by that of Mr. Herbert Spencer, has produced as his fourth principal work, following upon the Philosophy of the Unconscious, the Ethic, and the Philosophy of Religion, a comprehensive treatise on aesthetic Like Schasler's system as originally projected, it {1886). consists of two parts, the first historical and the second purely
Hartmann.
'''
theoretical.
The
historical
part
;
is
confined to
"German
from Kant onwards " the second portion is entitled " a Philosophy of the Beautiful," and fills 836 pages, as compared with 582 of the first part. This ratio compares significandy with Schasler's 1200 pages of history, followed only by theoretical works on a smaller scale. Moreover, within
aesthetic
the
first
part,
Hartmann
deals
historical
and partly
critical,
in separate essays, partly with detached questions in
NEGLECT OF HISTORY.
sesthetic
425
theorya very valuable treatment, but one which yet further diniinishes the space allotted to pure history, iI begin by noting that Hartmann significance of refuses to the History, jeal with the aesthetic of the ancients. Though admitting the historical interest of such studies, he considers that the "Aristotelian principle of imitation" and the "Platonic abstract idealism " are rightly held to be of no further moment for aesthetic theory while Aristotle's Poetic, owing to Lessing's glorification of it, has still an undeserved reputation, and Plato's obscure indications of aesthetic views are obviously not worth the emphasis that is laid upon them. This is only part of the author's general opinion that the historical and philological interest prevalent at the Universities leads to an over-estimate of the value of ancient philosophy in general, as of ancient esthetic in particular.^ In presence of this view, which as regards the pure theory of aesthetic has much in its favour, it seems desirable to point out a fundamental distinction. Granting for the sake of argument, what I cannot here discuss, that the work of ancient philosophy is fully absorbed in modern thought, and that for scientific completeness, at least in the theory of beauty, it is sufficient to start from eighteenth- and nineteenth - century researches, there is still a question as to the obligation imposed upon a content-theory by the peculiar nature of the matter with which it deals. Art, like philosophy, is a national and historical product, and cannot be adequately treated with the complete formal detachment with which exact science approaches its objects. Thus I might not so much miss the treatment of Greek aesthetic theory if I found in its place an appreciation of what beauty was for the Greeks. This we get, though at second-hand, in Miiller's, Schasler's or Zimmermann's history of aesthetic philosophy, as we get it at first hand in Winckelmann's, Schelling's, Hegel's, or Goethe's But by omitting the aesthetic and treatment of Greek art. not inserting the art, Hartmann has dropped out half the content of the science, being inveigled into doing so through the notion, fostered by histories of aesthetic opinion, that Greek philosophy came into the subject only for the sake of its pure Now really, the introduction of contributions to theory. Greek theory into aesthetic science in a historical form was a
;
Hartmann's
Aesth.,
i.,
Preface.
426
survival of the treatment of the Greek sense of beauty as an integral part of the object-matter, and taken as a clarified expression of that sense had value at once as theory and as content. The facility with which this integral element of content is let go seems to be in fact accounted for by a purely popular and naive position assumed by the author in respect of modern art.^ He appears to share the confusion which we trace in Schasler, between the abstract and concrete purposes of the artist, with the accompanying presumption that because modern reflection understands the mission of art better than earlier theory, therefore modern art itself is more favour" Only modern art, ably situated than that of earlier times.
which has broken with all mythology, can approach the I have already referred to the problem true aim of art." ^
thus raised, especially in my treatment of the Renaissance. In its most acute modern phase it is excellently discussed by Professor Bryce in his work on The American Commonwealth * much of course must depend on the sense in which "modern" art, in this usage contrasted with that of the middle age and early Renaissance, is understood, and the time at which it is taken to have begun. I have already expressed
;
this question.* as is too plainly the case, the author means to represent the course of art as a progress which has continued during the last three hundred years ^ in the same sense and
my
views upon
if,
But
* lb. 3 Vol. iii. p. * P. 413 supra. 554 ff. "Therefore it is only modern art, which has broken pp. 126-7. with all mythology, that can approach the true art-problem, to symbolize for sense the human spirit, which in its ideal aspiration knows the divine spirit
1
*
i.
126.
i.
See
to be immanent in it, through the totality of its ideal moods and actions. Against this colossal substantive advance we can make no account of the formal difficulties which are opposed to art by the abstract changes and ugly externalities of modern life ; it only results that formal beauty must more and more give way to characteristic beauty as the ideal content becomes deeper All this does not overthrow Hegel's dictum, and more subtle." that the ideal content attainable by art is limited by its sensuous vehicle, but it reverses Hegel's estimate of the value of ancient, mediasval [Wm. Morris' "modern"], and modern art into the opposite, viz. from a descending [this is false as regards Hegel's view of the two first terms] into an ascending series, not merely in conformity with content in the general progress of culture, but also from the purely aesthetic standpoint which takes account of content only in as far as it is adequately symbolized to sense."
..."
ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE
IDEALISiM.
427
degree with the progress of civil freedom, material prosperity, mechanical invention, and the natural and critical sciences, then this fundamental error explains his inability to appreciate the depth of Hegel's insight into the art-forms and artperiods,
and his indifference to the historical articulation of content, outside of which the object-matter of the science of
does not
exist.
I
sesthetic simply
turn to a point in which Hartmann's history has done good service. He is the first writer who has distincdy held, up to view the difference between abstract and concrete idealism in the history of aesthetic philosophy, and has thus placed the theory of the beautiful on a clear foundation from which I believe it will not be dislodged. He points out with great acuteness how all subsequent tendencies of German aesthetic exist in germ within Kant's Criiigtie of the Power of Jtidgment, and he distinguishes these tendencies as I.: the .Esthetic of Content, including, i. Idealism abstract from Schelling and Schopenhauer to Weisse and Lotze, concrete from Hegel to Carriere and Schasler and ii. the Esthetic of Feeling as in Kirchmann and Horwicz H. the .Esthetic of Formalism in Herbart and Zimmermann and HI. Eclecticism in Fechner. The distinction which he especially insists on, that between concrete and abstract idealism, depends on grasping or not grasping the essential doctrine of " Êsthetic show" {Schein), viz. that beauty, though it symbolizes ideas, only exists in the concrete forms of sense and fancy, so that in speaking of an idea of beauty we are already on slippery ground, and in speaking of beauty as having existence in an abstract idea we And against concrete Idealism, he fall into sheer nonsense.^ All opposition against insists, there is really no opposition. founded on the conception of it as abstract idealIdealism is ism. In this respect as in others the distinction shares the fortunes of that on which in fact it is founded, the logical distinction between the abstract and concrete universal. In another matter Hartmann has brought against the older concrete Idealism one of those useful objections, which though they may not be needed to correct the actual thought of a previous philosopher, are certainly needed to correct the popular Following Schopenhauer, and especially interpretation of it. insisting on the views of Trahndorff (a contemporary of Hegel
now
See above,
p. 409,
on Hegel and Hartmann.
428
whose works Hegel of an his view by
I
only
know through Hartmann) he
accuses
icy intellectualism, and desires to supplement that of Trahndorfif, who considers beauty as " love apprehending itself" * " love " being extended into the
" Beauty," Hartmann general sense of a demand for union. suggests as a definition on the basis of Trahndorff, " is the life of love apprehending its own ground and purpose in the idea,"* Hegel's first definition is, it will be remembered, that beauty I believe is the presentation of truth to sense and fancy. that the proposed supplementation is fanciful, just as I believe
that Schopenhauer's " will " adds nothing to Hegel's " idea." blind impulse is nothing ; and if the unconscious will is nothing apart from direction by the unconscious idea, then we return after all to the idea as a system of unconscious forces, a paradox which we might as well have faced to begin with. Hartmann, I think, fails to see that the aesthetic show or semblance, just because it is a concrete image reborn of the mind, necessarily embodies feeling as well as perception, because every concrete utterance of mind, every utterance of mind as a whole of sense fused with idea is stamped into what it is by a certain feeling. This is quite plain throughout Hegel, especially when love is explained to be the ideal, i.e. the essence of concrete expression, in romantic art. But if
any one could doubt
this aesthetic truth,
made
plain.
And
this service
it was well to have Hartmann has rendered.
it
In order to set the matter in the clearest light, he has in the systematic treatise ^ to the " Schein," pointing out that this conception of the aesthetic conception includes the projection of feeling into the object, while such a term as " Anschauung " need not suggest this In the same connection, moreover, he is anxious inclusion. to elucidate the nature of the aesthetic " Schein-gefiihlen," or actual though ideal and impersonal feelings roused by This discussion again is clear and helpful, and being beauty. so, cannot be pronounced superfluous, although it really does no more than develop in methodic form what Aristotle, as interpreted by Lessing and Bernays, had pointed out with reference to the idealization of "fear" through "pity," and the reference of aesthetic emotion to the self widened inltc humanity.
devoted a careful discussion
Hartmann,
Aesth.,
i.
146
ff.
2 lb.,
148
ff.
Aesth.,
ii.
22.
ORDERS OF BEAUTY.
The degrees
429
"VgS*""
grasped
intellectual form the general result towards which esthetic philosophy has been gravitating, and according to the theory which I have adopted must necessarily
The orders of Formal Beauty,
a.
" I" Spite of the criticisms which I felt bound * '"^k^ "Po*^ Hartmann's conception of the course of aesthetic evolution, it is undeniable that he has
grade of the beauty that depends upon content, and as passing upwards by degrees of concreteness into individual and characteristic expressiveness, which not only modifies the more abstract and formal elements of expression, but also includes and employs them. The "Concretionsstufen," or planes of concreteness, are set out systematically with a far greater scientific knowledge and completeness than that shown by Hegel in his corresponding account of symmetry, repetition, and the like. They comprehend six orders of formal beauty unconscious formal beauty or the sensuously pleasant the mathematically ^ and the dynamically pleasing the passively teleological (as shown for example in decorative beauty); the vital, bearing of course a substantial relation to some of the mathematical and dynamical forms and last of the " formal " orders, the regular or normal type in any species. All these elements of beauty are counted as formal, though each of course has one grade more of concreteness than that which precedes. Finally there
gravitate. carries out with methodical completeness. ^he conception of " formal beauty " as only a lower
He
beautiful or microcosmically indivirealized the true essence of beauty as characteristic expression. It will be obvious to the reader that the definition of beauty laid down in the first chapter of
dual, in
comes the concretely

which there
is
the present work, which has served as our guide through the evolution of the aesthetic consciousness, is presupposed in this arrangement of grades and planes. b. The treatment of the problem of ugliness,^ Ugliness In Nature. which Hartmann shares with Schasler, is encumbered by a prior difficulty concerning ugliness in nature, which I will try to clear away in a few words. Not content with bringing relative ugliness into all beauty, Hartmann finds, real ugliness widely distributed in nature, and in explaining this conviction betrays a very serious dualism, correspondingto the importance which he falsely attaches to a conscious aim
1
The
catenary curves are mentioned, p. 112.
* Aesth.,
ii.
142, 501.
430
Nature, at beauty as such in art. cause and in as far as she does not
he says, is often ugly beaim at beauty often she aims at beauty, and then she is beautiful. Now the former Let us put the distinction notion is doubtful, the latter false. clearly. Art is the better, to our perception at least, for being consciously adapted and selected, but not for consciously aiming at " beauty for beauty's sake." Beauty is the result of rationality expressed for sense art aims not at beauty but at
; ;
So again world as normally perceived, is not helped or hindered because natural processes are simply causal and exclude a conscious purpose directed to Beauty and beauty. Thus far all is analogous with art. ugliness are results of the particular modes in which at times these causal processes harmonize, or seem to us to interfere, with each other, and consequently with the needs of our perception. The consciousness of art, and the unconsciousness of nature are alike in being immersed in particular contents which determine them throughout, and an abstract aim outside and undetermined by special content is as impossible for the former as for the latter. But Hartmann appears to regard it as occasionally possible for the latter, i.e. for nature. This seems a wild idea. For, is nature ever aiming at beauty when she is beautiful Certainly not. Does Hartmann really believe that the colours of birds and flowers have a decorative purpose ^ independent of natural selection ? Surely this is an antiquated notion. Their purpose, if any can by analogy be ascribed to them, is the survival of the species in which they are displayed their result is beauty, because to our perception they are striking or harmonious. The whole opening for characteristic beauty in nature, and the possibility of seeing it in the mechanically determined forms of water, earth, rock, and vapour is destroyed by this idle dualism. Nature, we must take it,
the best expression of
in nature,
i.e.
some
particular content.
beauty
in the external
"i
is
absolutely logical, and therefore, primd facie, beautiful throughout. Individualities and their interference may no doubt produce in nature an analogy to ugliness, though it is to be remembered that in all development there is some
interference,
even interference which may be called
hostile.^
See
p.
The
242 of Grant Allen's Colour Sense. peculiar beauty of the Scotch fir is closely bound
up with the sense of
BEAUTY FOR BEAUTY
S SAKE.
43
But it is at least possible that the advantage of representative art is chiefly in introducing limitations appropriate to our powers and knowledge, and in compensating us for them by
an
artificial completeness or microcosmic character. In theorizing on the ugly of Nature, as we select it, we must bear in rnind the infinite context from which, in perceiving, we disso-
ciate
it.
that even in art it is well or possible to make beauty as such the guide and purpose. The abstraction is empty, and kills all content. The artist or the lover of natural beauty must be mastered by something in particular, something that lays upon him the necessity of appreciation or of expression. Though he is conscious, and nature is unconscious, yet with him, as with nature, beauty ^ is not a purpose but a result. In this we see the depth of Goethe's aphorism ^ that the principle of art is the significant, the result of successful treatment is the beautiful. The principle is what guides the result is not necessarily the aim. It is very suggestive in connection with this idea of an abstract aim that Hartmann finds it necessary to exclude architecture wholly from the free fine arts. " The beautiful of the lower grades suffers c. Ugliness In Beauty. diminution by reason of the laws of form that prevail in the higher grades." * Thus uniform repetition is lost in symmetry, simple bilateral symmetry is lost in the subtle balance of a picture, the highest refinements of form, it is said, are incompatible with devotion to the more recon;
Moreover we do not admit
resistance and definite strength conveyed by its rugged and broken outline. Those who are familiar with the rare sight, only to be seen in sheltered places,
of fine trees of this species retaining
all
their branches regularly developed,
and consequently presenting an unbroken and symmetrical contour, must have felt that, splendid as such individuals are, they hardly show the same
character as the scarred veterans of the hillside. 1 See Introd. to Hegel's Aesth., E. Tr., p. 36. 2 With all abstract terms there is a difficulty of usage arising from the possibeauty, i.e. a thing which is beautiful, is bility of taking them as concrete. no doubt what the artist yearns to create. But this means, I presume, that he has in him a content which cries out to him for full and harmonious expression in a certain medium which is suitable to it and has already moulded But just because it is a beauty, it cannot be beauty as such. Abits idea. Art for art's sake is a silly notion. I straction is a sure sign of decadence. am not sure that in its root it is not Abstract Idealism of the supposed Platonic
type*
Hartmann,
Aesth.,
..
11.
217.
432
dite
harmonies of colour, smooth or simple tone-combinations do not meet the needs of great musicians at their greatest, and the normal generic regularity of human lineaments (the so-called Greek or statuesque outline) or the uniformity of respectable character must be departed from in painting and in the drama in order to reveal fully the beauty
of individual characterization. " Ugliness," ^ then, " is just so far sesthetically justified as it is a vehicle of the concretion of the beautiful " {der KonThat which is comparatively beautiful krescenz des Sckonen). as against the relatively more abstract beautiful of the lower grades, is characteristic as against the other concrete beauties "The more* characteristic any beauty is of its own level. upon its own level, the more serious are the forfeitures which that is, within every it imposes on the beauty of lower levels grade the formal ugliness which is aesthetically indispensable is the greater as the beauty is more characteristic." Technically, therefore, Hartmann appears to maintain (i) that there is ugliness in all beauty, but not qua ugliness, only and (2) that all ugliness is only qtid an element in beauty relative, being " the expression of the illogical in a world which The different modes in which, on the is essentially logical." ^ highest or individual plane, it is " overcome," produce such modifications of the beautiful as the touching, the comic, the tragic, and the humorous. (i) It seems then that the ugliness which norNo Ugliness In Beauty. mally enters into beauty is what we may call apparent ugliness only, that is to say, a merely relative intricacy or narrowness which at first sight taxes the inexperienced perception. It does not seem that to a just appreciation This doctrine, nominit is in fact ever presented as ugliness. ally in polar antagonism to that of Rosenkranz, but practically not very different from his, may in general be accepted as a conclusive testimony to the width and depth of true beauty, in which the strong and the significant play an increasing part as the education of the individual and of the race proceeds from the formally to the characteristically expressive. Taken more in detail, however, the conception arouses a Ought the strong and definite to be called certain doubt. ugly at all, when it does not assume the shape of a disguised
; : ;
Hartmann,
Aesth.,
ii.
219.
* lb.,
220.
* lb,,
256.
UGLINESS IN BEAUTY.
43;
contradiction in which the part fraudulently claims to be the whole? Mr. Ruskin ^ once said that genuine imagination was distinguished by the power of making a right or beautiful whole out of ideas that taken apart were wrong or ugly. But he has since modified the expression of this view. It is plain, indeed, that every definite element readily becomes illogical in an improper context. All features of characteristic beauty are therefore potentially ugly, and the more so, the more they are characteristic. The doctrine of a necessary forfeiture as we ascend the grades of concreteness is more doubtful, and may be seriously misleading. There is, it is true, a fascination in spiritual expressiveness superadded to a grave deformity in face or figure. But if the theory means that this is the normal type of the characteristic, then the theory is false. True ugliness, the fraudulent perverse of the beautiful, is not an essential element in the characteristic, though the characteristic has power in the last resort to " overcome " even this. But expression may be the " flower and native growth " of noble body as of noble mind. As in the head of Goethe or of Pericles, it may be the natural intensification of vital meaning rising from a structure nobly planned throughout. The departure from the lines of statuesque regularity, demanded by individualization, may I do not say that it always does introduce lines and colours of greater and not less formal beauty than those laid down by the "generic" type. And so with the whole set of gradations. It is a truism that repetition undergoes a change when it passes into symIt is a metry. It is not so clear that it undergoes a loss. truism that bilateral symmetry undergoes a change when it but whether passes into the balance of a Turner landscape arguable question. Without discussing the it is lost is an purely logical problem of the meaning of change and loss in dialectic, which is merely verbal so far as concerns sesthetic, I will merely point out that the theory seems wholly to lose sight of the true clue which is also the crux in this question, viz. the complete permeation of apparent ugliness by the The point which strikes tissue and texture of simple beauty. to-day is not merely how ugliness enters into beauty, but us how beauty enters into ugliness, as indeed the doctrine of
Mod.
Painters,
ii.
148
ff.
F F
434
" planes of concretion " requires, when rightly understood. In the great works of great masters, however strange or difficult from their intricacy, originality, or profoundness, the decorative texture is usually, more splendid, more harmonious, and more lavish in beautiful detail, than is possible in slighter productions if they are not to be oppressed and overloaded. special work has been published dealing with the patterns on the robes of the great pictures in our National Gallery, and they well deserve it. What decorator ever painted a velvet gown like Tintoret, or cut in marble such lines and folds as the drapery of the " Fates" in the East pediment of the Parthenon
surely the most beautiful block of marble in the world ? What composer of ballet-opera can vie with Beethoven in wealth of melody ? Are there any verses in the most graceful poems of Tennyson that for sheer beauty of sound and rhythm can compare with Ugolino's story of the hunger-tower, or with the words of Prometheus in his agony, or of Macbeth in his
despair
conception of a simple forfeiture of formal beauty by all individualization is incompetent to face such questions as these. It is by recognising that concrete characterization, even though difficult or terrible as a whole, yet gives more and not less play to the absolutely indisputable elements of formal beauty, that we are first led to conjecture its true place in the beautiful world. While the painting of the English " pre-Raphaelite " artists still appeared ugly to the common taste in England, it happened that among other points, so Mr. Ruskin tells us, the critics attacked their perspective in particular drawings. Here at last was a plain issue ; Mr. Ruskin took his stand upon it, and was able as he conceives to show conclusively that on the pure question of correctness the critics were mistaken. Such a proof, only affecting relations low down among the elements of formal beauty, paves the way for the idea that the art, which is so far correct, may have some beauty in it after all. What we really have to do with in the whole of this problem is an extension of the sense of beauty by which its familiar and formal basis is not narrowed but on the contrary is both enlarged and fortified. If Hartmann only means that the painter can achieve what the sculptor would be mad to attempt, that we knew before. If he means that the painter, in his more intricate works, loses the balance and harmony of
The
INSUPERABLE UGLINESS.
sculpture,^
435
we say, No, it does not follow. We have not merely to suggest that a forfeiture of sculptural beauty is incurred by passing on to painting and music, but something deeper and wider than this, viz. that all true characterization is capable of entering into beauty without essential forfeiture of the qualities which have always been known as beautiful.
Beaiwguness.
(?) Whether there is or is not insuperable ugliness, i.e. whether some ugliness is absolute and
some merely relative, or all merely relative, seems to be one of those problems in which a difference of degree passes at length into a difference of kind. But the important point to
fix
upon is this, that not mere contradiction is the illogicality which corresponds to ugliness, but only such contradiction as is disguised by fraud or confusion. Exposed contradiction is
reconciled contradiction
;
confusion, the contradiction given as
a positive existence, is the only genuine falsehood. Therefore what we have to dread as ugliness insuperable either by healthy perception or by the " characteristic " of art, is not the narrow, the rude, the terrible, the grotesque, or even the vicious when frankly and forcibly revealed for what it is as plainly represented in their apparent ugliness, these elements become modifications of the beautiful. We must look for insuperable
;
ugliness in its highest degree in the falsely beautiful produced by the confusion of aims and feelings in conscious representashall find it in the sentimental presented tion, i.e. in art. as touching, the effeminate as tender, in the feeble taken to be delicate, the tawdry taken to be brilliant, and the monstrous Its lower degrees we shall find in the taken to be strong. of man, not always as ugly in themselves, utilitarian works except when they present a simulated show of ornament devoid of interest or vitality, or as in discords of sound and colour introduce an artificial definiteness that has no ccsthetic relations, but creating by their simple abstract shapes and un-
We
* An objection occurs here. Why, if painting has all that sculpture had, and more, do we still care for sculpture after painting has been developed, or I suppose the answer is that for painting when music has been developed? the " something more " is something moire than for all purposes we want and
one sense, something less. This " lessness " does not depend on the an element, but on the inseparable fusion of two elements, one of which we may justifiably desire to have by itself. It may a,lso be noted that sculpture and painting have never held quite the same position, since painting and music respectively reached their highest development, as they had before.
so
is,
in
loss of
436
graded colours an element of interference with the subtle and In external variously graduated content of external nature. nature itself it is hard by this standard to pronounce anything insuperably ugly except perhaps those disfigurements of individuality which indicate an alien life asserting itself Speaking victoriously within a higher form of existence. generally, is it not true that vegetable decay is beautiful or tolerable, and animal decay is ugly ? It must be noted that A wounded in man the spirit may overcome disfigurement animal is apt to be ugly the dying Nelson is heroic. I do not think that Hartmann has given weight to this distinction between the negative and the false, or the contradictory and the confused. And therefore, though he has done good service by his robust insistence on the characteristic, I cannot think that he has wholly mastered the nature of the extension which that insistence demands from the sense of formal beauty. The whole in great art, I repeat, is frequently shocking to the untrained perception the parts are what we first see to be endowed with formal beauty. To conclude this subject, I may add that Hartmann does well by laying down clearly that ugliness and evil have absolutely no connection except as reflexes in different worlds of the same apparent irrationality within an ultimate rationality. Beauty, as we have seen, is symbolic, not imitative, and therefore goes behind the form of morality, which is co-ordinate with it, to that soul of things which art and morality render, each in its own way.
;
" iiibase the division of the arts^ on that Qf aesthetic semblance {Sckein), so that we draw The division of the aesthetic it from the nature of the case. Schein places in the foreground a division into arts of perception and arts of fantasy, which is then crossed by a secondary division into threes accordingly we shall first have to separate the free arts [the unfree arts including architec, ture and the 'lesser' arts are placed in a wholly separate classification] into two divisions as arts of perceptive 'Schein' and of imaginative Schein (Phantasie-Schein), and subsequently to subdivide each of these groups into threes. Thus we obtain to begin with as a primary antithesis the contrast of arts of perception and poetic art, by which poetry is
ThediviBionof
the Arts.
'
'
We
'
'
Hartmann,
Aesth.,
ii.
625.
PARALLELISMS.
437
assigned its due ideal rank as an art of higher phase (Potenz); but further, we obtain the parallelism of the arts of perception with the species of poetry, corresponding to one another as formative art to Epic poetry, Music to Lyric poetry, and Mimik' (acting and the mimic dance) to the Drama. " The lover of abstract designations will be glad to find in the primary dichotomy of arts of perception and arts of fancy, the truth of Schelling's division into a real and an ideal series, and the friends of dialectic triads will recognise to their satisfaction, in the secondary triple division of the two groups, the triad of objective, subjective, and subjective-objective. The secondary triple division represents in addition, among the arts of perception the contrast of Rest, Change, and Motion, or Spatiality, Temporality, and Spatio-temporality, or eye-semblance, ear-semblance and the two together while in the arts of the reproductive imagination (reproduktiven Phantasieschein) it represents at least the predominance or equilibrium of the elements in question. In both groups or series, finally, the secondary triple division represents the predominance of perception, of feeling, and the equilibrium of the two. It is obvious at first sight that the epos, intended for recitation, is in its plastic and coloured (plastisch-koloristischen) vividness just as analogous to formative art, as the song, which is meant to be sung, to music, and the drama, which is meant and these analogies and parallelisms to be played, to Mimik have so often been noted and insisted on in detail, that it is absolutely incomprehensible how it has been left for me finally to combine them." " Finally ^ we have to answer the question how the compound arts are related in sesthetic value to the simple arts. Here there are two extreme views one rejects the compound arts altogether, because each of their elements is hindered by its relation to the others in the freedom and independence of its development the other view treats of the simple arts only as steps on the ladder to the achievement of the total work of art, and sees the true realization of the work of As usual art according to its idea exclusively in the latter. The simple arts can no more the truth lies between them. replace the complex ones than the latter can make the former As surely as Mimik '^ judged by its abstract superfluous.
' ; '
'
'
1 P.
824.
See above,
p. 422,
On
the principle of conflict.
43^
aesthetic value, stands higher in the
system of arts than
thf
one-sided arts of rest and change lz.e. formative art anc music!] which it synthetically transcends and absorbs, but yet the practice of the latter is not replaced or made superfluous by this fact [How kind!], as surely as poetry stands higher in aesthetic value than the arts of perception which il synthetically transcends and absorbs, without thereby annihilating the raison cFitre of formative art, music, and Mimik,' as surely as the quaternary complex arts stand higher in abstract aesthetic than the ternary, without thereby requiring that the song, the oratorio, the ballet, or the stage play> should wholly give place to the opera, just so surely the simple arts are bound to maintain their place in general besides the complex ones, although the latter occupy in the system a higher posi'
tion in abstract aesthetic value." This, I must observe at once, is really method run mad. Assuming that the phrase "transcending and absorbing" has, as it may have when reasonably interpreted, a meaning in comparing the powers of music with those of painting, or the
powers of painting with those of sculpture, is it not quite clear that no analogy holds from this fusion of powers or qualities in the nature of a single medium or type of fancy, like sound compared with paint, to the mechanical combination of them by the association of different media in separable aspects of a compound work ? The whole passage, which I quoted because it puts Hartmann's view conveniently together, and shows the outrageous results of the extreme Wagnerian influence (I do not say of Wagner's own theoretical writings, with which I am not acquainted), could hardly have been written by any man with a true feeling for any branch of art.
The principle of division with its results is of the same general kind with that of Schasler, and is subject to the same criticisms in respect of the double series, the neglect of the material and its inspiration,^ and of the decorative or " lesser" arts (to which neglect we may add in Hartmann's case the low position assigned to architecture), the insertion of " Mimik " at a high point in the scale, and the parallelism between the traditional species of poetry and the other forms of art. There is, however, an attempt to deal with more modern forms of
^
Just referred
to, p.
552, but not further employed.
THE COMPLEX
poetic
art,
is
ARTS.
439
lyric, ^
which
the nature of but is set down with the usual formula as a transition to the drama, from which it is really quite alien, being essentially an individual characterization, and, so far as we yet see, incompatible with the tendency to combine characters in a drama that will really work. The culmination of the whole system in the "quaternary combination" has already been criticised. The problem of these combinations is closely akin to one of translation, the question being how far the same idea can have its aspects adequately and harmoniously rendered in different media. Now translation from the language of one art into that of another is a hopeless Sometimes thing except in a few happy or very easy cases. the same content which has moulded itself in one medium will by suggestion but without compulsion mould itself correspondingly in another, and then a great combination will arise.^ But the arc for which two great minds will follow the same orbit, or for which the same mind, however great, can control two disparate media, is necessarily small, and its limit is the The true inevitable limit of great work in complex art. indeed, has been banished from the genuine arts complex art, by the author. In architecture, so organic yet simple is its growth, so vast its extension, and so intimate yet unambitious its inter-relation with the joys and needs of life, not only very many workmen but very many kinds of workmanship can be brought together with spontaneity and success. Architecture is the true type of a complex art. have seen the inheritance of the great idealists being methodically completed in the hands of able and learned men, who thought it well, and justly, to borrow the apparatus of accurate science and formal definition from the "exact" enquirers who were opposed to the earlier concrete idealism. Issues are more plainly stated, the theory of formal beauty on any branch of is exhibited with more method and detail observations may be found eesthetic production some sensible by using the elaborate tables of contents of the later systematic
fairly explained,
as for example the dramatic
We
writers.
The of fairly enlightened views scholasticism has set in. passion for novelty passes into touch of life is lost; the
1 P.
But with methodic completion and the general acceptance
740
S.
'
As
in Beethoven's use of the
Hymn
to Gladness.
440
bizarre suggestions,
and the desire to make discoveries, incompatible with the philosophic temper, displays itself in idle rearrangements and refinements of classification. Clearness of methodic arrangement and the habit of telling one's story plainly, together with a full recognition of the place and import of beauty as apart from edification, from amusement or sensuous satisfaction, from imitation, and from mere formal decoration, have been won by the idealist methodisers with the help of the exact sestheticians, and will not again be lost. But from the theory of content and expression which has thus been perfected, the content has itself in some degree oozed away. It may be mere national prejudice, but I believe it to be a well-grounded conviction, which causes me to turn to England for a re-animation of the bond between content and expression. As the true value of German idealism in general philosophy was never understood, till the genius of English naturalists had revolutionised our conception of the organic world, so the spirit of German aesthetic will not be appreciated until the work of its founders shall have been renewed by the direct appreciative sense of English art and criticism. With a very brief account of this in the ensuing chapter I propose to conclude the present work.
CHAPTER
XV.
BEGINNINGS OF A THEORETICAL REUNION BETWEEN CONTENT
AND EXPRESSION.
in Germany, we saw reason was the operative ferment from which aathetic. German Idealism sprang, and was immediately reacted upon by that Idealism. The English mind travelled by a different road and arrived at a corresponding esthetic position from complementary but different data. Between the two movements there was little direct contact. From Alison in 1 790 to Mill, Spencer, and Bain in the middle
Fbuosopuc
I.
Esthetic theory
recent Eaîah to think,
of the nineteenth century, British psychological philosophy maintains its course, attributing aesthetic effect mainly to association, and advancing the real problem, viz. what is
accidental in association and point at which Burke had left
it.
what is not, little beyond the True English aesthetic has
not sprung from philosophy or philosophers, except through the negative contact of Mr. Ruskin with Alison and Burke. Only Herbert Spencer, as has been noticed above, ^ made a real contribution to the ideas of spontaneity and economy in the beautiful, in the latter case certainly anticipating Fechner, and independently confirming the results of the brothers Weber." On the other hand Spencer's theory of the vocal origin of music is not even directed to a serious problem. Granting for the sake of argument that musical beauty was first apprehended through the voice, we gain from this no sort of explanation as to the conditions which underlie the musical The fragmentary and expressiveness of the voice itself. partial, although prior in time, must be explained by the In so far systematic, and not the systematic by the partial. as voice-modulation has musical expressiveness, its beauty depends upon musical relations, which in a vastly wider range of effect than that of vocal cadences are the matter to be
explained.
*
P. 386 supra.
See
p.
386 supra.
442
With German philosophy, previously to the development of the English aesthetic of which I am about to treat, and during its course, there has been I believe but a very slight and negative connection. How far the pregnant ideas filtered through Coleridge and Carlyle may have influenced Mr. Ruskin is a question which I cannot answer.^ But no such influence seems to me to be needed as an explanation of his life work. Other conditions, not proceeding either from philosophers or from the universities, were more effectually
brought to bear.
'^^^ French Revolution, to which, as Carsuggested, the intellectual work of Goethe's generation bore a strange analogy, marked rather than created an immense disquieting force in many directions. Our islands, thrown back on their insularity by the Peninsular War, nevertheless felt the electricity of the general atmoI will enumerate rather than attempt to analyse the sphere. conditions which constituted the "data" of our "modern
General
infltt-
^'
enceoithe
lyle
aesthetic."
. . Antiqmtles.
valuable antiquities were constantly being carried off" and shut up in English country houses, and England like other countries was eager for the spoil, under the influence of a revived Renaissance connoisseurship. Before 1 8 1 no Greek works of the fifth century b.c. were in the British Museum. In that year, after a discussion that is now amusing
that
to read,* showing once more how taste worked back from the lesser and later to the greater and earlier antiquities, the
Winckelmann had grumbled, we remember, ...
111
i..
1 I should have thought that Mr. CoUingwood exaggerated the probability of connection ; see Ruskin's Art Teaching, p. 16. ' I extract an account of this matter from a lecture by Miss Sellers, printed in the U. E. Journal, March, 1892. "The Government, to whom Lord Elgin had repeatedly offered the Marbles for sale, had been as often dissuaded from the purchase by the judgment of artists, and in particular of the ' connoisseur,' Mr. Payne Knight, virhose prejudiced action in this matter may, however, be forgiven, when we remember the beautiful bronzes and other objects which he afterwards bequeathed to the Museum. In 18 15 the Government was roused by the admiration which the Italian sculptor, Canova, had evinced for the Marbles, to appoint a Committee to reconsider the matter of the purchase. The account of the last battle is worth reading from Haydon's own biography : " The Committee opened its proceedings. ' West, President of the Royal Academy, Lawrence, Nollekens, Flaxman, and Westmacott were summoned
THE ELGIN MARBLES.
443
were acquired
Elgin marbles and about the same time the Phigaleian frieze for the Museum. Since that date the lacunae in the periods represented have been filled up by works of the sixth, fourth, and third centuries b.c., and the eyes of students have been familiarized with the real value and sequence of phases of beauty which Winckelmann had so marvellously
divined.
on the side of English art ; on the side of the connoisseurs, Mr. Payne Knight, Lord Aberdeen, Sir Charles Long, Lord Famborough, and seven others. Lord Elgin's chief witnesses were W. Hamilton and Haydon. " Lord Elgin and Haydon were both favourably impressed with the Committee at opening, but it soon began to show the cloven foot. The favourable
'
witnesses were hurried over, but to the opposite side was paid the greatest attention and respect. Of the professional witnesses, Nollekens called them "fine things," Westmacott called them "igood things." Flaxman said they were " the most excellent things of the kind he had seen, though he preferred the Apollo Belvedere to the Theseus " (the gods forgive him !). Chantry said " they were according to Nature in the grand style." West feebly praised them, He said he considered them but Lawrence spoke out for them manfully. " examples of the highest style of art, of essential importance to art, and particularly to historical painting." Mr. Payne Knight was equally decided. " said Lord Lansdowne's Venus or Mercury was " each worth any two of the " articles " in Lord Elgin's collection, that the Theseus was " spurious," and the Lord Aberdeen and his friends followed in rest of the " articles very poor." much the same strain. And them came the turn for the examination of Lord For three days, on one plea or Elgin's professional witness, Haydon. another, Haydon was put off by the Committee. At length, on the afternoon of the third, they commissioned Mr. Banks, M.P., one of their number, to inform Lord Elgin that " Mr. Haydon would not be examined out of delicacy to
He
Mr. Payne Knight."
Haydon stung not only by his personal defeat, but by the Marbles might be lost to the nation after all, wrote that celebrated pamphlet entitled, On the Judgment of Connoisseurs being preferred to that of Professional Men, in which, after mercilessly showing up the falsity of his the taste of the time (particularly that of Mr. Payne Knight), he passes to immortal defence of the Marbles. ' To these divine things,' he concluded, with an enthusiasm which all the bombastic style of the time cannot dim 'to
"After this rebuff,
fear that the
upon and false judgment he had exposed."
I never enter these divine things I owe every principle of art I may possess. among them without bowing to the great Spirit of Art that reigns within them. and will continue I thank God daily that I was in existence on their arrival, Such a blast will Fame blow of their grandeur, to do so to the end of my life. now sunk in barthat its roaring will swell out as time advances, and nations ages yet unborn, will in succession be roused by its thunder, and barism, and Pilgrims from the remotest corners of the earth be refined by its harmony. will visit their shrine and be pacified by their beauty.' "The outburst silenced the opponents, the Marbles were purchased for the Museum, but Haydon, poor man, paid dearly for his victory, by bringing down himself the undying hatred and persecution of the men whose ignorance
444
^.
It is
the first volume of published in the same year as Stuart Mill's Logic (1843). It is needless to recite the history, familiar, I hope, in its outlines "to every schoolboy," of the achievements of the scientific spirit during the present century. Its result, for our purpose, may be stated in general language as the recognition of rational system throughout the universe accessible to man. More particularly, on the side facing aesthetic theory, we may signalize two tendencies within this movement. First, it brought nature nearer to man, and showed him his own intelligence both mirrored in its causation and rooted in its evolution and secondly, it revealed in all phenomena, inorganic, organic, and belonging to humanity, the definite distinctive characteristics which on the one hand had stamped them for what they individually were, and on the other displayed them in their microcosmic relations as meeting-points of the complex influences that permeate the universe. In this latter connection the life work of Sir Charles Bell,* directed against the abstract ideal in art and towards a causal theory of expressiveness in the human face and figure, paved the way for Darwin's researches upon that The whole result of geology, and of the organic subject. sciences gfuided by the principle of natural selection,^ has been to the same effect, and even the phenomena of colour in plants and animals have been shown to play their part in the causal In this last relation the conception forces itself on system.* the mind that the import of colour distinctions might perhaps be approached not only by assuming the connection of wavelength and hue, and asking how on this hypothesis organisms
""*
a striking
fact* that
Modem Painters was
CoUingwood, op. cit. 20 and 76. E.g. Lectures on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, ist ed. 1806, Son, 1880). It is remarkable that in this work re-written 1840 (Geo. Bell he gives the same explanation of Laocoon's alleged sflence as that of Goethe (did Goethe get it from him ?) viz. that from his physical attitude Laocoon cotM not cry out. Payne Knight's ideas, which he is combating, show entire ignorance of Lessing. Knight actually says that no tragedian could let a hero cry out at his death-wound without making the audience laugh. I must own that the representation of Agamemnon's death-cry, which Knight seems not to know of, did once in my recollection cause a smile. 8 Of course this principle was not made known till long after Mr. Ruskin's
^
&
The Naturalisfs Voyage must have appeared about the work had begun. same year with the Modern Painters and Mill's Logic. Its second edition
bears date 1845. * See Grant Allen on the Colour-Sense.
THE NEW BIRTH IN ENGLAND.
445
are benefited by the possession of this or that reflecting surface, but also by examining this connection itself, as a relation that must have been causally determined in the course of evolution. It is conceivable that some advantage was to be found in the wave-length^ commonest on the earth's surface being seen as green rather than as red. Only the ethereal undulation was given the corresponding sensation, for all we know, was modifiable. c. As a complementary counterpart to the Komantio Natnr*"*scientific revelation of the world as responsive to reason, there developed with amazing rapidity the conviction sentimental in Schiller's sense that the world had also a response for feeling. The mere history of the tour and the guide-book, from Rousseau, Goethe, and De Saussure, through Wordsworth * to Ruskin, and thence to the modern sentimental tourist of the worse or better type, would well repay the writing. With the tourist come the field geologist and the field botanist, and with these come the landscape It was rather through Wordsworth, Turner, Lyell, painter. and Darwin, than through a Winckelmann, a Lessing, or a
;
The Schiller, that the new renaissance dawned in England. insularity of our country had to do with this detachment one can read Goethe's story of his childhood without seeing how
No
his imagination was affected by the pageants of the Empire at Frankfort the visible organic continuity into which he was born. The sense of history and the spirit that is
sympathetically critical of the religions and philosophies of past times were wanting to the leaders of our thought. Those who were sympathetic were not critical those who were Yet from the time of Walter critical were not sympathetic. Scott our sentimentalism became capable of a historical colouring; a new feeling for Gothic architecture and the " lesser arts " arose attempts, however ill-directed in some respects, were made to familiarize our people with the art and workmanship of other times and countries ; and when the " pre-Raphaelite brotherhood " had begun its enterprise and the voice of Carlyle had made itself heard, the same spirit of thoroughness, audacity, and penetrative insight that was con.
surface cit. on the prevalence of green on the earth's times of evolution. in early . ,. , , a Author, it must be remembered, of a Guide to the English Lakes I
1
See Grant Allen, op.
446
quering the intellectual world under the banner of science, began to reorganize the world of feeling under that of romanFor I must repeat that normally and tic naturalism in art. on the large scale romance and naturalism are the same. The modern yearning for external nature has the same root as the modern love of symbolism, of character, and of passion. It is only a would-be scientific naturalism,* at once prurient and moralistic, that is opposed to romance, and a conventional romantic sentiment, remote from the feeling for genuine passion, that is
opposed
d.
to naturalism.
Ought not to be supposed that I am The Democrauc Spirit. wandering from my subject if I point out in the briefest words that behind and within all these phenomena there was operative the rising spirit of democratic solidarity.
It
In England
we
did not derive this spirit by

;
way
of philo-
it sprang up from sophical inspiration from the Hellenes the destructive aspect of science, complex causes, including but also more deeply rooted in the European and national circumstances of the time, and it carried our interest to The " watchword of Reason and Hellas,* not Hellas to it. Freedom " ' and the ideal of a human and beautiful life for every man were not popularized here, as in Germany, through professorial and scholarly persons in association with classical culture, and historical continuity, and the dominant philosophy of the universities. On the contrary, they were wrought out in various detail by political and social reformers, by abstract sceptical philosophers, by poets and men of letters, by artists and by special students of art and history. Therefore the connection of social life with beauty was long un-
^ It is not my business to attempt the work of the art-critic. The philosopher's task begins when he has the best critical opinion before him. But I may appeal to my readers to judge whether it is not true that the three antisesthetic tendencies of art, the " scientific," the moralistic, and the impure, Of course, an artist may have great genius are constantly found in union. and yet be hampered in his art by a theory which has these results. * I mean to genuine Hellenic thought and politics and beauty. The philHellene enthusiasm of Byron, Shelley, and Keats forms no doubt an important link through European politics with the spirit of the time, but had, I believe, little effect in the way of spreading a real feeling for Hellenic The fact that Keats knew the Greeks only through the classical antiquity. dictionary is most instructive with regard to the connection between artGrote's History is plainly a result of political sym. stimulus and learning. He believed that Athens progressed by Reform Bills. pathy. 8
Hegel, Briefe.
ENGLISH ESTHETIC.
apparent.
447
The reformers thought first of the industrial system and of the franchise, the poets and philosophers of sentiment and of knowledge, while the artists lived exclusively for their art. The spirit of humanity was in all of them alike, but was not aware of its own identity and thus the connection of life and art, of content and expression, was reached, so to speak, underground by a de facto induction, and was perhaps more vitally grasped, though far less clearly and systematically expounded, than where as in Germany it had to be attained by the concurrent intellectual labours of many men endowed with philosophical genius and reviewing
;
an immense
of ordered material. '^'^^ Strength and weakness of the best Synthesis of Content and English aesthetic of the the last half-century Expression, ^^^j^ principally of Mr. Ruskin and Mr. William Morris lies in its restriction to the field of formative art. Never before, so far as I can form a judgment, has such critical and literary genius been combined with such definite but on the other hand skill in the object-matter of research reservation once for all, and I I make this quite obvious need not recur to it no one whose interest is directed to art as a whole could be satisfied with a theoretical treatment which seems not merely to ignore the arts of music and poetry, In this but even at times to imply their non-existence. criticism I am alluding to the reiterated doctrine of the unity of art understood as equivalent to the assertion that if one I do not doubt that this idea art dies then all are dead. points to a profound truth, or that a diseased social condition reacts upon the sense of beauty in all its manifestaBut here, as everywhere, we must distinguish the tions. It is simple matter of history partial from the perverse.
field
3"
the various arts have never flourished in their perfecnay not even in a fair degree of forwardness in the know well that same period and in the same country. culminations not simultaneously the several arts touch their but in succession, and while I fully admit that the prosperity of art in general falls within the great Art-age that closed with the Renaissance, yet we must not shut our eyes to the independent fact that music finds its only complete and painting almost as much may development (and of landscape be said) full two centuries after the unity of the art-tradition, But in spite of all as our critics understand it, had perished.
that tion
all
We
448
this,
at least
wkhin the theory of formative art a new vitality is supplied by the work of our great writers, which precisely justifies, by an undesigned coincidence, the conception of the early concrete Idealists of Germany, and supplements what is defective in the arid formalism of their sucof connection
cessors.
Mr. Ruskin's theoretical treatment of uglii. êgg i (Joes not seem to be bold enough for truth. Technically speaking, he seems to hold the position of Rosenkranz, that ugliness can never become beautiful, but yet is essential to art for the sake of completeness. To live wholly in beauty, he is said to teach,'^ is unhealthy a monstrous position, if beauty is comprehensively understood. But this is not a matter of first-rate importance. As we have insisted throughout, the true question is in the first instance as to the range and vigour of beauty itself. Now in one aspect of this question we owe something like a revolution to the English art and criticism of this century. This aspect is our appreciation of external nature in the form of landscape Schasler, we may remember, thought landscape so scenery. wholly a matter of subjective mood that he made it in his classification the corresponding term to lyric poetry. Now in an ultimate sense it must be true that when we feel the beauty of Nature we read our moods into her phenomena. But we may do this profoundly or superficially, conceitedly or humbly, If we have eyes for what Hegel ignorantly or with insight. calls the "uniform, direct, and solidly coherent sequences of nature," we enter into it as though for its own sake, and only by so doing can we recognise in it our deeper selves. It is this point of view that we owe to Mr. Ruskin's unwearied justification of the art of Turner, and it is not too much to say that he like Winckelmann has given the mind a new organ for the appreciation of beauty. "The characteristic" in nature as a whole, though a point of view imperatively demanded by the theory of Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling, was a region in which we found them weak.' They thought more of the individual formation, the crystal, the plant, the animal, while
The
eaaracteriBUo.
See Collingwood, Luskin's Art Teaching.

Goethe's morphology had more to do with the specific than with the
in-
lb. 3
dividual characteristic.
CHARACTER IN NATURE.
449
the co-operating laws and larger combinations of phenomena were scarcely within the range of the characteristic as they understood it. But fully in the spirit of science though guarding himself, as I think, far too timidly from urging scientific study upon the artist Mr. Ruskin has pointed out with loving appreciation the value and import of variable curves, graduated colours, and the nature and stratification of earth and rock, so that to the nature-lover versed in this expressiveness, the hills and plains, the cliffs and river-courses are able to tell their story like a human face. Without intellectual analysis, through the mere habit of sympathy, they are construed as determined by movements continuously varying, and showing themselves in growth, decay, and resistance, that is in lawfulness and individuality. It seems needless to dwell at length on ideas so familiar to all students of natural beauty, but to discharge my duty as a historian, who must not leave his readers to do his work wholly for him, I will extract two passages that illustrate the beauty of characteristic expression in matters in which if we can find it we may find it anywhere. " steep ^ bank of loose earth of any kind that has been at all exposed to the weather contains in it, though it may not be three feet high, features capable of giving high gratifiIt is almost a fac-simile of a cation to a careful observer. slope of soft and decomposing rock ; it possesses mountain nearly as much variety of character, and is governed by laws It is furrowed in the first place of organization no less rigid. by undulating lines, caused by the descent of the rain little ravines, which are cut precisely at the same slope as those of the mountain, and leave ridges scarcely less graceful in their When a contour, and beautifully sharp in their chiselling. harder knot of ground or a stone occurs, the earth is washed from beneath it, and accumulated above it, and there we have a little precipice connected by a sweeping curve at its summit with the great slope, and casting a sharp dark shadow where the soil has been soft, it will probably be washed away underneath until it gives way, and leaves a jagged hanging irregular line of fracture ; and all these circumstances are explained to the eye in sunshine with the most delicious clearness; every touch of shadow being expressive of some particular truth of structure, and bearing witness to the symmetry into which the
Modern
Painters,
i.
307.
G G
450
whole mass has been reduced. Where this operation has gone on long, and vegetation has assisted in softening the outlines, we have our ground brought into graceful and irregular curves, of infinite variety, but yet always so connected with each other, and guiding to each other, that the eye never feels them as separate things, nor feels inclined to count them, nor perceives a likeness in one to the other they are not repetitions of each other but are different parts of the same system. Each would be imperfect without the one next to it." " The truths of form in common ground are quite as Valuable (let me anticipate myself for a moment) quite as beautiful, as any " A really great artist dwells others which nature presents." on every inch of exposed soil with care and delight, and renders it one of the most essential, speaking, and pleasur;
able parts of his composition." Or take an example in which the central character of a whole complex of natural scenery is summed up in a single architectural product, which therefore, if brought before the eye in art, prescribes the law for the whole region that is perceived. " All rivers, ^ small or large, agree in one character, they they cannot bear to have like to lean a little on one side their channels deepest in the middle but will always, if they can, have one bank to sun themselves upon, and another to get cool under one shingly shore to play over, where they may be shallow and foolish and childlike,^ and another steep shore under which they can pause and purify themselves, and get their strength of waves fully together for due occasion. . Two arches over the same span of river, supposing the hutments are at the same depth, are cheaper than one, and that by a great deal so that, where the current is shallow, the village mason makes his arches many and low as the water gets deeper and it becomes troublesome to build his piers up from the bottom, he throws his arches wider at last he comes to the deep stream, and as he cannot build at the bottom of that, he throws the largest arch over it with a leap.
;
Elements of Drawing, p. 263 if, I cannot but regret the playful expressions of this passage, for my present purpose, as liable to misunderstanding, though no one who has read Mr. Ruskin on the Pathetic Fallacy will misunderstand them. The fact about
^
river-courses
is
familiar to
all.
THE IDEAL BRIDGE.

and with another
451
little one or so gains the opposite shore. course as arches are wider they must be higher, or they will not stand ; so the roadway must rise as the arches widen. And thus we have the general type of bridge, with its highest and widest arch towards one side, and a train of minor arches running over the flat shore on the other usually a steep bank at the river-side next the large arch always of course a flat shore on the side of the small ones ; and the bend of the river assuredly concave towards this flat, cutting round, with a sweep into the steep bank ; or, if there is no steep bank, still assuredly cutting into the shore at the steep end of the
Of
bridge.
this kind of bridge, sympathizing, as it does, with the of the river, and marking the nature of the thing it has to deal with, is the ideal of a bridge." The characteristic, thus apprehended, including in its expression signs of the feeling with which the sympathetic or idealised self enters into the world-life thus symbolised, is fully in the sense of Hegel, but possesses a wealth and vigour which in the beauty of landscape scenery his eye was never trained to appreciate. And here, in its simplest form, if we bear in mind the nature of che curves and graduated surfaces demanded according to the above exposition, is the vital bond between content and expression. " In Speaking of Goethe's Geinnan Building'^ Theufeofthe wortanan. \ alluded to the chapter On the nature of Gothic " in The Stones of Venice. In this chapter and in those essays on the same theme, enriched with the knowledge and feeling of the practical designer, which we owe to Mr. Wm. Morris, the unity of content and expression is stated on a higher level, or as Schelling would have said, in a higher " power." Here the root of identity is not a causal process of nature assigned a meaning by analogy, but it is the life of a self-conscious being. The reason wJiy this identity had to be specially and forcibly dragged to light in the case of the workman in architecture is that in this art only (including in it " the lesser arts of life") could it ever be attempted to divorce them. No one would maintain as a general doctrine that a dramatist might confine himself to constructing his scenario, and leave his secretary to write the dialogue, or that a painter
spirit
' '
"Now
P. 306 sufra.
452
HISTORY
OF.
ESTHETIC.
might be satisfied ^ with furnishing the cartoons for a picture, and leave it to a journeyman to execute. But just because in these higher arts the inseparability of content and expression is pre-supposed, owing to the high degree of individual talent demanded even for tolerable performance, the connection of the two aspects within these arts is assumed rather than scrutinised, and is apt to drop out of its true place in the It is theory. Architecture at once challenges an answer. determined by utility of some kind not primarily a it is
;
representative art the work set to the individual workman appears simple, partial, and definite. need he be thought of as an artist, or the determination of his mind freely by a content instead of mechanically by a gauge be insisted on at all ? have here a limiting case. I answer in Mr. Ruskin's words.* "It is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labour of inferior minds and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up an unaccusable whole." " For the best that is in them (the workmen) cannot manifest itself unless in company with much error. Understand this clearly. You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one, or to strike a curved line and to carve it, and to copy or carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision,' and you find his work perfect of its kind ; but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops his execution becomes hesitating he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking But you have made a man of him for all that. He being.
;
Why
We
was only a machine before, an animated tool." "On the other hand, if you will make a man of him, you cannot make a tool.
1 Approximations to such practices on the part of fresco painters and ol sculptors who work only in clay raise the same problems as architecture. ^ Stones of Venice, ii. 161-2. * In so far as true Greek work is classed with the " servile " work, there seems to be here a certain neglect of the extreme difference between Greek and
Roman ornaments. Greek moulding-curves, we are told, cannot be strucli with compasses, and if they are copied such copying as this surely requires some free qualities in the workman. I regret that my technical ignorance disqualifies
me
from entering further into
this subject.
See
p.
35 supra.
ETHIC AND ESTHETIC.
453
Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing, and the engine-turned precision is lost at once.
Out come
all
his roughness, all his dulness,
all
his incapability
;
but out comes the whole majesty of him also
and we know
the height of it only when we see the clouds setding upon " And on the other hand go forth again him." to gaze upon the old cathedral front where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors examine once more those ugly goblins and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid, but do not mock at them, for they are the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone a freedom of thought and rank in the scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for
; ; ;
her children." It is probable that some readers may not recognise that we have here in essence the same problem with that which, following Kant, nearly all German writers discuss under the title of " Genius" that is to say, the peculiar endowment by which the rational content is given in a state of active and productive feeling, and by which all production of beauty is distinguished toto calo from everything in the nature of scientific apprehension. "In artistic production, the spiritual and sensuous side must be as one." ^ The bond of union is this, in short, that as in a natural process the form expresses the law, so in the work of a man, as long as no machine intervenes, his operative ideas qud operative, together with their results in the way of automatic activity, are expressed in the production of his hands. The work reveals the man, and the man is the incarnation (in sense and feeling) of ideas. This is in conscious I do production the link between content and expression. not substantially assent to the criticism passed by popular writers upon Mr. Ruskin, that he turns aesthetic into ethic. are dealing, of course, with a thinker who cares no jot for system or formula but if we try to interpret, we must interI may here pret fairly by the whole drift of his doctrine. refer " to what I said in dealing with Plato as to the essential
;
We
1 Hegel's j^sth., Introd., E. Tr. p. 74. Hegel says in another place of the gem-cutter that he must have his ideas in the form of [muscular and tactile] Plainly this, in some feeling, for he cannot so much as see his minuter work. sense, is true of all art On the moralistic principle in Plato, p. 18 supra.
'^
454
connection between the content of ethic and that of aesthetic, which it is a worse error to neglect, than to state with technical incorrectness. I do not think that in the main Mr. Ruskin is chargeable with anything but a technical defect in philosophic formulation. I will admit, however, that there are occasional sermons which I cannot altogether defend, and which are chiefly to be regretted because they give a passing interest to malicious platitudes which no one would otherwise attend to.^ It is necessary to observe that in this feeling for content we recognise the social spirit and the spirit of true history, which has in all provinces of research gained ground during the present century. In Germany, we observed, the historical led up to the aesthetic synthesis;^ in England aesthetic insight has had a remarkable influence both on historical research and on
economic theory.
Mr. Ruskin, but of the very highest critical quality, are the contributions of Mr. Wm. Morris to the theory of expression on the basis of the lesser arts. The neglect of these arts has been throughout the weak point of the intellectual aesthetic of Germany (Plato knew better) but it was only in the later methodisers of idealism that, as we saw, the feeling for material fell wholly away, and was replaced in the classification of the arts by all sorts of mere abstract corollaries from the nature of their media, I do not believe that the question of the classification of the "higher " arts can be properly approached except from the point of view supplied by the simple experience of the distinctions which arise automatically and react on the fancy and the design in the use of such materials as clay, glass,
;
"' Less Content and ExpresBiontatiie activity of
ambitious than the immense literary
quote enough to show in what upon the connection of content and expression, and upon the general defiI
wood, metal, and stone.
way
this vital feeling of the material operates
nition of beauty.
one would turn his head to listen to the remark that " All art is usewhich is as old as Aristotle in matter, and claims attention merely by a certain malice of expression, if Mr. Ruskin had not challenged it by maintaining in a vein of paradox easily intelligible, that all art is useful. Although the latter again affected the former; Ranke seems to have been first- interested in his subject by Walter Scott's novels, though adversely to their representations. It was the historic interest in the form it took for the romantic school that preceded philosophical aesthetic.
^
No
less,"
,2
THE ROOT OF BEAUTY.
455
"No doubt^ many of you have wandered through the galleries of the admirable museum of South Kensington, and like me, have been filled with wonder and gratitude at the beauty which has been born from the brain of man. Now consider, I pray you, what these wonderf>.il works are, and how they were made and indeed it is neither in extravagance nor without due meaning that I use the word wonderful in speaking of them. Well, these things are just the common household goods of those past days, and that is one reason why they are so few and so carefully treasured. They were common things in their own day, used without fear of breaking or spoiling no rarities then and yet we have called them wonderful.' " And how were they made ? Did a great artist draw the designs for them a man of cultivation, highly paid, daintily fed, carefully housed, wrapped up in cotton wool, in short, when he was not at work } By no means. Wonderful as these works are, they were made by 'common fellows,' as the phrase goes, in the common course of their daily labour. Such were the men we honour in honouring those works. And their labour do you think it was irksome to them ? Those of you who are artists know very well that it was not Many a grin of pleasure, I will be that it could not be. bound and you will not contradict me went to the carrying through of those mazes of mysterious beauty, to the invention of those strange beasts and birds and flowers that we ourselves have chuckled over at South Kensington. While they were at work, at least, these men were not unhappy, and I suppose they worked most days, and most part of the day, as we do." " That * thing which I understand by real art is expression
;
'
his pleasure in labour." It as to the kindred art of making glass vessels. Never till is on much the same footing as the potter's craft. * our own day has an ugly cm- stupid glass vessel been made and no wonder, considering the capabilities of the art. In the hands of a good workman the metal is positively alive,
by man of
"
Now
Morris's Lectures on Art, p. 55. Lectures on Art,
a lb., p. 58.
others, p. 195. . ^ that sounds like this in Hartmann's Aesih., u. 136 ff., ornament starts but it will be observed that his reprobation of fraudulent degree to the the postulate of simple utility, and does not allude in any
8
by Morris and
There
is
much
from connection of shape
etc.
with the pleasure of the craftsman.
456
and is, you may say, coaxing him to make something pretty. Nothing but commercial enterprise capturing an unlucky man and setting him down in the glassmaker's chair with his pattern beside him (which I should think must generally have been designed by a landscape gardener) nothing but this
kind of thing will turn out ugly glasses. This stupidity will never be set right till we give up demanding accurately gauged glasses made by the gross. I am fully in earnest when I say that if I were setting about getting good glasses made, I would get some good workmen together, tell them the height and capacity of the vessels I wanted, and perhaps some general idea as to the kind of shape, and then let them do their best. Then I would sort them out as they came from the annealing arches, (what a pleasure that would be !) and I would put a good price on the best, for they would be worth it, and I do not believe that the worst would be bad."
all that, it is true that these non-architectural races the Chinese stand as a type of them) have no general mastery over the arts, and seem to play with them rather than Clumsy-handed as the to try to put their souls into them. European or Aryan workman is (of a good period, I mean) compared with his Turanian fellow, there is a seriousness and meaning about his work that raises it as a piece of art far above the deftness of China and Japan and it is this very seriousness, and a depth of feeling which brought to bear upon the matters of daily life is in fact the soul of Architecture, whatever the body miay be so that I shall still say that among ourselves the men of modern Europe, the existence of the other arts is bound up with that of Architecture. For this art of building is the true democratic art, the child of the maninhabited earth, the expression of the life of man thereon." The views thus eloquently but quite definitely expressed are not a matter below the consideration of philosophy, although they would need development and explanation in order to hold true of the individual and highly imaginative forms of art. They supply an essential factor in aesthetic theory which neither the bare doctrine of characteristic expression nor even the closer analysis attempted by formalist aesthetic have the power to furnish. As I said above, the true correlative to these conceptions is Kant's doctrine of
"
For ^
(let
Lectures,
by Morris and
others, p. 184.
EXPANSION OF THE SELF.

genius,^ and,
I
457
of the ideal.
art
may add, Schiller's doctrine of play, and Hegel's The theoretical question is this Granted that
:
and beauty have a
content, the revelation of
which to
sense is their distinctive mark, yet how, by what mechanism, so to speak, is the content got into the form of utterance in a definite object appealing to sense ? The answer is given on a small scale, but justly and profoundly, by the lesser arts of life. The content gets into the product through being in the man, and through being in the man in such a way that in as far as he is free in his producing activity, the content will, by means of disciplined habit together with overmastering impulse, modify his production with satisfaction to himself Psychologists tell us that pleasure appears to indicate both harmony and expansion of the self. The content which appears in art seems then to operate through that expansion of the self which comes in utterance, and which from the nature of the content claims to be a harmonious expansion. I suppose, in fact, that every expansion qu& expansion must be harmonious. Contradiction baffles and exhausts attention, and so counteracts expansion. Thus the simple genuine experience which this artist-writer puts before us, corroborates and completes the theories both The of the great idealists and of the " exact " sestheticians. at one with itself, or, as man, as he is when his nature is Schiller says, when he is at play, is the needed middle term between content and expression and the characteristic utterance that genuinely issues from the fulness of a man's heart may be savage, clumsy, or grotesque, but will not be ugly.* How different all this is from " the piece of slang* that does art for not mean the harmless thing it seems to mean art's sake," and from the false accuracy * of the doctrine that banishes architecture out of the province of the free arts,
;
while allowing that
it is
beautiful.
"Some beautiful piece of nature must Cf. Morris and others, p. 217. are to make good wall-paper designs] have impressed itself on our notice so forcibly that we are quite full of it, and can, by submitting ourselves to the rules of art [the formal principles of expressiveness] express our pleasure
1
[if
we
to others."
* *
Cf. Goethe's Deutsche
Baukunst,
p.
309-10, supra.
cf.
Morris's Lectures on Art^ p. 54. * See Hartmann on Architecture, Prof. Brown, Fine Arts.
and on the merits of the question,
458
iv. The synthesis of content and expression in that " characteristic " which overmasters the mind unaginatioiâBd *''b^5^"* and feeling receives a splendid development in Mr, Ruskin's analysis of " The penetrative Imagination."^ I am sorry to learn* that in later years Mr. Ruskin abandoned the fruitful distinction here drawn between Imagination and Fancy. The name of Imagination, he applied, when this chapter was written, to the insight which seizes the heart
of a matter, and works from within outwards, while Fancy he identified with the spirit that luxuriates in detail without ever piercing to the core. And the deepest truth is touched when he reminds us that thus understood Imagination is charged with love and fire, while Fancy is indifferent and frigid, " one of the hardest-hearted of the intellectual faculties." I observed, in reproducing Goethe's scheme of aesthetic qualities, upon the subordinate position which it assigns to the " Phantomisten," * or votaries of capricious fancy. The fact is, that from Aristotle's account of tragedy as representation of life and action to Shakespeare's " holding the mirror up to nature,"* we do not find capricious or unreal fancy in the work or theories of the greatest men. But I do not know that the consequences of this truth had been drawn out with the requisite audacity before the Modem Painters was written. I need not point out how such a view of imagination must crown the growing recognition of the characteristic in beauty. " It may seem^ to the reader that I am incorrect in calling this penetrating possession-taking faculty Imagination. Be it so the name is of little consequence the faculty itself, called by what name we will, I insist upon as the highest intellectual power of man." " Every great conception of poet or painter is held and treated by this faculty. Every character that is so much as touched by men like .Êschylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare, is by them held by the heart and every circumstance or sentence of their being speaking or seeming is
; ; ;
Modern
Painters, vol.
ii.
sect. II. c. 3.
p. 138.
*
'
CoUingwood, Xuskin's Art-teaching,

P. 314, supra.
* On the other hand, Shakespeare's account of imagination as a faculty of the unreal is put in the mouth of Theseus, the half-contemptuous, though wise and liberal sovereign. The account of it as deceptive is given to Touch-
stone.
5
Modem
Painters, vol.
ii.,
chap.
''
of Imagination Penetrative."
BEAUTY IN TWO SENSES.
459
seized by process from within and is referred to that inner secret spring of which the hold is never lost for an instant so that every sentence, as it has been thought out from the heart, opens for us a way down to the heart, leads us to the centre, and then leaves us to gather what more we may."
How far the synthesis of beauty and essential expressiveness which we should expect to accompany such an idea of the imagination has really been attained by Mr. Ruskin is a point on which it would be rash to pronounce. Between the first and the second volume of the Modern Painters there was an interval of at least three years, and in forming a final opinion it would not be just to confine ourselves to these two volumes, nor even to the Modern Painters as a whole. At first sight, and judging by those two first and more purely theoretical volumes, a natural and laudable inconsistency would seem to have overtaken him, the inconsistency which we have so often noted as arising from the self-assertion of the wider, as against the narrower and more familiar meaning The first volume, in laying out the of the term " beauty." gigantic scheme of the work, enumerates as distinct subjects of treatment within the excellence of Art, ideas of Power, Here Beauty ranks, Imitation, Truth, Beauty, and Relation. fact it did for Rosenas in name it did for Goethe, and as in In the kranz, as one among other excellences of art as art. volume ideas of Power {i.e. exefurther course of the same cutive skill) are discussed with comparative brevity, and a very prolonged discussion of ideas of Truth absorbs the reIt is plain from the whole course mainder of the volume. the treatment that Truth of the genuine kind, though proof fessedly distinguished from beauty, is here treated as an element of excellence in art. Now in the second volume the scheme is formally pursued by the discussion of Ideas of Beauty as a co-ordinate element in the excellence of art but the plan seems to develop in the author's hands, and it may be a question whether in the very fairly systematic account
;
beginning with typical {i.e. pretty much what we have called formal) beauty, and proceeding to the various grades of "vital " beauty in an order that practically corresponds to the " arrangement of Hegel or Hartmann the "idea of beauty has not re-expanded so as to include the elements which were
referred to in the previous volume as outside the region of Formally then, we have not escaped from the the beautiful.
460
dualism which appears in Goethe, according to which beauty Yet if we is only one among other excellences of art as art. absorb the account of " Truth " in the first volume into the doctrine of the degrees of typical and vital beauty all characteristic laid down in the second, and complete the whole conception by the analysis of the penetrative imagination, there will be little left to desire in the range ascribed to the beautiful. The immense predominance of instances in which ugliness is predicated of art, and the opinion of its extreme rarity in Nature, harmonise with the idea of its essence suggested in the present work. And even if it is wrong in theory to consider Nature as all but perfectly beautiful, and if we are to admit that by conflict and mutilation she produces ugliness as insuperable as any to be found in art or the works of man (which I do not believe), still the general idea that, as she is typical of reason, her fundamental principle is to be beautifuP is far nearer to the truth than the bornS perception which sees ugliness in the desolate, the quaint, the sombre, or the chaotic, and in all uncommon or transitional animal forms. The fact is, as Professor Baldwin Brown* has well pointed out, that the northern artist was the first to be in thorough sympathy with the wilder and more mysterious aspects of our globe. V. It may be asked in what sense the classifica. of ' ClaBslncatlon Material appued tion by sensuous material is to apply to poetry. to Poetry, j^^^^ j^ ^j^^ material of poetry ? I think that in replying we must take a distinction. It is best in all philosophy to start from the simple facts of denotation as prescribed by well-established connotation from the application, that is, of the term we are discussing, as determined by usage duly grounded in habit and experience. If we ask, then, whether poetry is a matter of fancy or imagination, and independent of a particular kind of sensuous material, namely sonorous and rhythmical language, let us begin by putting the question whether there are any poems which are not in verse. Considering the English version of the Old Testament poetical books, and I suppose the originals of these books also, which are rather rhythmical than metrical, or other translations into prose /rom more distinctly metrical originals, we must accede to the opinion that only rhythm and not metre is essential to poetry. But even this is an indulgent
,.,
Vol.
ii.
p. 63.
The Fine Arts.
Part III.
SOUND IN POETRY.
construction.
46
In the full development of its nature what we call poetry unquestionably demands metre. Without quantity, or systematically recurring accent, or rhyme, we have not the definite signature by which the poet in versification stamps, his imaginative expression with a form and harmony of its, own and of his own. In this, then, the proper and accepted sense, poetry is an art distinguished from the other arts and characterised in itself by its material, which is metrical or rhythmical language,, and always a particular language, demanding a particular treatment no more the same with that of any other language than the treatment of wood can be the same with that of marble.^ It is essential to poetry as such to have beautiful and characteristic sound. I do not therefore agree with those who set down the imagination as the true material of poetry. Of course there is a difference in degree. While no art can use wholly meaningless form, yet the pure formal beauty of sensuous material can be employed in formative art I will venture no opinion about music with a freedom from definite significance which would shock us in the use of language. As a limiting case, where language is used for purposes which are all but purely decorative, we may think of the "refrain," which is most effective in my judgment when it fills a place in the meaning and grammatical structure at each recurrence. Yet in some forms of verse it is not expected to do this, but merely to bring a certain sound and a certain element of fancy before the mind at intervals, like the repeat of a pattern. On the whole, however, meaning is required from the forms of every art, and in abstaining from " nonsense verses," poetry is merely complying with the fundamental law of beauty. But though we hardly ever speak of a poet who is not an artist in language, nor of a poem which is not in words, it is true that in a sense poetry is the universal art or, to adhere: more closely to usage, all art has the quality which we call " poetical." This is no doubt an attribute of imagination acting in a certain way, best described as the penetrative All sensuous and imagination of which we spoke above.
Latin and the or Alcaic.
Let anyone think for a moment of the difference between the Greek, the German or English Hexameter, or the Greek and Latin Sapphic
462
.concrete ideas, even abstract thought- sequences as embodied in a whole of individual and typical import, can be the material of this imagination, and therefore it enters into and is operative in all recognition
like
and production of the beautiful. But most analogical usage, this employment of the term " poetical " is hazardous. There is always a risk of confusing the special with the general import, and of meaning by a "painted" or a "musical" poem, not merely that the picture or piece of music shows a high degree of penetrative imagination and ideal feeling, but that it trenches on the province of poetry proper by telling a story or describing a character, which is rather a vice than a merit. To speak of poetical moods or ideas as occurring in the mind, without reference to art, is again a different usage from either of the above it only refers to moods and ideas fit for poetry, but not in fact thrown into poetic shape, just as a pictorial or musical idea may come into the mind which for any of various possible reasons we do not proceed to complete as a work of painting or music. It is by far the truest as well as the simplest view to take
;
poetry proper according to its connotation in common speech, as confined to words in metrical or at least in peculiarly rhythmical arrangement, and to treat all other usages of the term as merely analogous in different degrees. I may fortify this position by the remark that while I do not deny the poetical quality of the Psalms, of certain passages in Carlyle, and of occasional brief portions in many prose authors, yet what is usually called poetical prose appears to me to be not poetry but rhetoric, a thing scarcely compatible with poetical quality, although in certain cases of passionate pleading they have a point of contact. I have not, of course, said that all I am only discussing how far poetry can verse is poetry extend into what is commonly called prose, not how far prose can extend into what is commonly called poetry. I presume that here again the penetrative imagination, with its attendant depth of ideal feeling, would be the difference required in addition to metrical language. This is the root of the Aristotelian " universality " of poetry. I have now to the best of my power ful4conclusion filled the promises of the first chapter. I have attempted to present the fundamental theory of beauty entertained by the ancients as the basis of the most pregnant
;
ANCIENT AND MODERN MONISM.

conceptions
463
how
reached by the moderns,^ and have shown passed from the formal to the characteristic, from the beauty of the picture-frame to the beauty of the picture,^ following slowly upon the growth in width and penetration of the actual aesthetic consciousness or sense of the beautiful. have seen how in this progression the sense of beauty has been almost infinitely extended, not by superficial generalisation but by the acquisition of a deeper sympathy. The predicate "ugly" has been in the main expelled from the region of inanimate nature and almost from the non-human organic world and has been banished to the morbid or fraudulent productions of the human consciousness in the search for beauty. As specific doctrinal systems of the supernatural in contrast with the natural, and with them the theory of antecedent intellectual design in creation, have faded away, the vision of man has been sharpened for the direct appreciation of unity and immanent reason both in the world and in his own life. And it is possible now to understand how the unresting dualism of the romantic consciousness
aesthetic reflection
We
philosotraced the genesis in immediate connection with the speculative apprehension of the aesthetic synthesis. On the other hand, if we turn from the critical and reflective appreciation of beauty to the realm of beautiful production, it is idle to deny that we find ourselves faced by a solution of continuity such as in recorded history has had no precedent. The practice of art "for the people and by the people, a joy to the maker and the user,"* no longer exists in the more civilised nations of the world, zxA pari passu with the spread of civilisation is ceasing to exist where it has hitherto survived. few words on the present demands of -Êsthetic science and on the outlook and future of the concrete sense of beauty may
essential moment in the evolution of the monism of to-day from the naturalistic monism of Of this spiritual monism, in its formulated Greece.
was an
spiritual
classical
phical shape,
we have
fitly
conclude this work. i. The divorce from history which is so marked of jBsthettc recent methodismg aesthetic ought not to conscience to-day. |.jjjyg jf jg qyjtg within the powers of a thorough
See
p.
4
*
supra.
^ See pp. 41-2 supra. Mr. William Morris passim.
464
philosophical treatment to combine the achievements of forma analysis with a due regard for the joint evolution of content and expression, and for the possible non-permanence oi aesthetic species. The spirit of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Pater,^ with something of the historical system ol Hegel, and the precise lucidity of Herbart and Helmholtz, might find their place in a philosophical science, employing the same variety of intellectual organa with modern psychology, or with biology in its most comprehensive signification. Of one side, and that the chief side, of such a treatment Carriere has furnished a splendid example in his Art in iti Connection with the Development of Culture ; but in order rightly to indicate this connection it cannot be necessary tc compile a complete history of civilisation and place it by the side of a complete history of art. More division of labour than this must surely be possible, and an over-estimate of the magnitude of the enterprise leads by a natural reaction to the abundance of commonplace and second-hand work from which Carriere is not free. For the purpose which I have indicated the first necessity is to open our eyes to the present condition of the arts, and to ascertain what in them is living, and what species, under present conditions, are dead or in suspended animation. I know nothing more wearisome than the purely generalised and systematic discussion of the epic and the drama,* without allusion to the times of their greatness and the conditions of their genesis. Taking the drama, for our purpose, to mean genuine stage-plays that have permanent literary value, we see at once that tragedy at all events has flourished but twice in the world's history, and that only for brief periods, namely, for threequarters of a century at Athens, and for a century and a half in England and France together. The comic and bourgeois drama no doubt has a wider range, but also the total quantity of comedy which to-day survives in literature belongs, I imagine, to quite definite and not very protracted periods.
1 I aware that the work of the philosopher must be inferior in tact original feeling for art to that of the skilled art-critic. But unless he
am
and
can
gather something of genuine sympathy and insight, his actual work qud philosophy will be spoilt by his simply not knowing what beauty means. 3 Hegel has the excuse of having lived when the Greek renaissance was in its first flush of splendour, and when the Goethe-Schiller drama seemed to herald a revival of the theatre.
QUESTIONS FOR ÊSTHETIC TO-DAY.
465
As for epics, the name is taken from the Iliad and Odyssey par excellence, and every subsequent epic has in fact been a new species, differing from these and from all the rest in
and in conditions of genesis. are our forms of poetry to-day ? In what relation do they and the conditions from which they spring stand to the great works of the past and the conditions from which they sprang To whom do they appeal ? Do Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller hold the popular stage in Germany to-day } Do Racine, Corneille, and Moliere hold the stage in France ? If not, then, in each case, why not, and what has taken their place, or has anything done so.? Do the people care for drama that has literary value ? Would they care for it if they could get it ? These are not questions of otiose curiosity. The answers depend on simple fact, but their import is the material for philosophy. It is the pervading and fundamental problem of content and expression. The same kind of investigation might be applied to other kinds of art, not of course with purely statistical ^ methods and results, but in order to ascertain in what impulse it originates and to what need it corresponds, and to correlate the feeling of the beautiful, and the connection of content and expression, thus revealed, with the evolution of the aesthetic The novel, or consciousness down to the present time. bourgeois epic, would have to be considered in its peculiar adaptation to the conditions of modern life, which are in many ways so hostile to the formative arts. " How should any man," it may be said, " desire to-day to address his fellows otherwise than through the printed book, by which his thoughts are carried at once, exactly as he sets them down, Had Leonardo lived in this cenall over the civilized world } tury, he would have been a great writer of criticism." More might be done, I feel confident, for the analysis of musical expression than has yet been attempted. The subject
significance, in national import,
What
.?
has fallen to the ground between rival theorists.
Musicians
but in
it
have
rightly
and naturally refused

into
to believe that the tone-
structure can be rendered

practice,
common
have
language,
tried to
though not perhaps
in theory,
endow
Though
whom
For whom and by statistics would be interesting and valuable. are the thousands of canvases painted that are sent in to the Academy
?
year by year
H H
4.66
HISTORY OF /ESTHETip.
with imitative powers formalists have attempted to assimilate all musical expression to the single relation of consonance and dissonance associationists have approached the problem from the still more trivial and abstract observation of cadences resembling those of emotional speech. And thus it is left to the unmusical philosopher to protest that there must be more in it than all this put together ; that the consideration should be initiated positively, not negatively {t.e. by mere transference from, and comparison with this or that which is not music) that in music we have a material or medium with certain perfectly definite properties, different from those of any other sensuous vehicle, and obviously lending itself to particular kinds of combinations, transitions, idealised motions with a character impressed on them which is more than that of bare motion, more even than bare rhythmical motion and pervading the whole, both in co-existence and in succession, an audible lawfulness and necessary precision of structure, as clear and as mysterious as that of nature herself. Surely it must be possible, following upon the track of Plato, Schopenhauer and Hanslick, to steer between the hazards of denying, with Mr. Gurney, that any explanation or analysis can at ail unveil the mystery of melody and harmony, and of asserting with the formalist or the associationist that it is all a question of smooth intervals or of suggested cadences of voice. Surely the character, the typical spirit and mode of combination, transition, repetition and so forth, within important musical works, could so far be detected by a subtle but impartial criticism as to throw light on the connection of expression and content within the region of musical beauty.' In the aesthetic of the future Psychology has, as I have already indicated, a leading part to play. Though I do not believe in aesthetic as the analysis of expression apart from the analysis of content, it appears that to analyse the pleasurable nature of utterance or expression will be a necessary pendant to analysing the kind of content which, in the course of evolution, comes to demand embodiment or appreciation. spoke of the law of economy in attention, as connected with the principle of economy in graceful movement, and ultimately
; ; ; ;
We
1 The notes which I print as Appendix II. are to mind examples of the sort of analysis required. Of course there may be much criticism of this kind
my
in specialist
works on music with which I
am
not acquainted.
QUESTIONS FOR iESTHETIC TO-DAY.
467
more complex contents ? Is it not by more than mere reproductive memory, is it not rather by a true sense of indwelling properties, that the hand of the free workman is guided to the springing curve whose peculiar law of formation causes it to be
felt at
With the Platonic and Aristotelian conception of the necessary relation between whole and part. Can this or similar translations into the psychical movement be applied to other and
once as expressing the very joy of vitality ? What is the nature of the delight in simple colours, and is it an illusion to suppose that we perceive them as simple ? What of tones the same way, and of combinations both of colour and of tone ? Can anything be done with them analogous to what has been done in the comparison of circular and catenary curves ? What is the connection between sense and sound in verse ? Does not the sense, by suggested emotion, affect the sound ? Is the relation of splendid versification to the expression of profound ideal feeling rooted in the nature of mind ? How is it distinguished in regard to artistic truth from the case in which the passion wholly lames the utterance ? Under ^yhat conditions does emotion disable, and under what conditions does it stimulate the expressive power ? Again, what are the effects of scientific training upon aesthetic capacity ? Is the deficient visualisation of ideas, said to be observed among men of abstract intellectual pursuits, an indication of deepseated hostility between the two modes of mind, or only a plea for more vital and concrete training in intellectual things ? How does the general theory of pleasure and pain connect with the aesthetic theory of beauty and ugliness ? In short, what is the psychical connection between content and expression, or between the nature of either of these and its pleasurableness ii. It is impossible to believe that just as the TbeFntnreof *^" sense of beauty has become deeper and stronger ^ than ever before, the productive capacity of art has received
.*
^ I quote an excellent statement of the gain which has come to the modern I refuse to believe, with sense of beauty by a deeper and wider sympathy. " Haggard Egdon the gifted author, that it involves a corresponding loss. appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair. " Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule.: human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony
468
its
deathblow. But it is idle to look back, or to deny that if, of the present hostile conditions, there are many that may and must be removed, yet many again are, and must be permanent. The basis of life will always henceforward be intellectual and historical, not naive and natural, except in the sense of a second nature. No single tradition can ever again enthrall the world from father to son in a mere routine of faith, and bind the artist-workman securely to his one good custom a^ the only rule he knows. The soul has won its intellectual liberty, and with it an infinite capacity for making mistakes, and this it will never surrender. shall increasingly employ the printing press and the machine. Formative art can never again be the chief instructor of peoples. 1 1 is idle to rail against conditions demonstrably inherent in a life that has behind it two thousand active years of art, science, religion, and philosophy. Yet even from an sesthetic standpoint these losses are not without their gain. Even machinery has its good tidings for us, if rightly used. Many of the reforming aestheticians seem
We
me to forget that it is worse to do by hand what can be done well by machinery, than to do by machinery what can only be done by hand. In the latter case you try to make a machine do a man's work, which is impossible. In the former you make a man do a machine's work, which is immoral. " Whatever can be done (that is properly done) by machinery, ought to be done by machinery."^ The present system combines both evils. But what is needed is not to join the ranks of the machine-breakers, but to draw the line rightly between mechanical and non -mechanical production. Some critics are
to
fond of saying that
we make nothing
well
now
but the instru-
ments of war. They omit one class of appliances, the instruments of science. A compound microscope of the present day is one of the greatest triumphs of intellect in workmanship that the world has ever seen. We must not forget these
things, for they
mean a new power
in the
human beings who
with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking amona mankind." Hardy's Rglurn of the Native. 1 Henniker's Trifles for Travellers.
THE OUTLOOK.
469
make them.
false.
Exaggeration
is
always harmful, besides being
we have a
are surrounded by ugliness of our own making, larger and keener sense of beauty. If the habit of reading threatens the position of formative art, the world of literature is open to all men, as never before, while music is a comparatively recent gift to humanity. comparison with the great epochs of the past may give us hope. Our finest
if
And
we
spirits feel to-day much what Aristophanes felt when he attacked Euripides, and when it seemed to him that poetic art in its noblest sense had departed to the world below. So a Renaissance critic might have felt, with greater justice, after the death of Michael Angelo. It is true that in the last hundred years, although certain reservations are to be made such as I have pointed out, with reference to music, landscape, portrait painting, and poetic art, yet the discord has cut deeper than But ever before, and the popular art-tradition is interrupted. the mind is stronger to-day, and the self is fuller, and we know that it lives by movement and not by fixity. The deeper discord can therefore be borne, and is a testimony to the strength of the life which it does not fatally maim. Naturally, it will take a longer time to resolve, and we cannot But in anticipate in what shape the resolution may come. spite of all hostile conditions, man is more human now than ever he was before, and he will find out the way to satisfy his imperious need for beauty.
APPENDIX
I,
DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT.

In order that the reader may have fully before him the structure of Hegel's partly analytical classification of art-forms/ I reproduce here in extenso the closing section of the Introduction to his Êsihetik, Vol. i. pp. 89-114, from the translation with notes, which I published some years ago." I. It has already been said that the content of art is the Idea, and that its form lies in the plastic use of images accessible to sense. These two sides art has to reconcile into a full and united totality. The Jirst attribution which this involves is the requirement that the content, which is to be offered to artistic representation, shall show itself to be in its nature worthy of such representation. Otherwise we only obtain a bad combination, whereby a content that will not submit to plasticity and to external presentation, is forced into that form, and a matter which is in its nature prosaic is expected to find an appropriate mode of manifestation in the form antagonistic to its nature.
The second requirement, which is derivable from this first, demands jrf the content of art that it should not be anything abstract in itself. This does not mean that it must be concrete as the sensuous is concrete in contrast to everything spiritual and intellectual, these being taken as in themselves simple and abstract. For everything that has genuine truth in the mind as well as in nature is concrete in itself, and has, in spite of its universality, nevertheless, both subjectivity and particularity within it. If we say, e.g. of God that he is simply Otie, the supreme Being as such, we have only enunciated a lifeless Such a God, as he himself is not abstraction of the irrational understanding. apprehended in his concrete truth, can afford no material for art, least of all Hence the Jews and the Turks have not been able to reprefor plastic art. sent their God, who does not even amount to such an abstraction of the understanding, in the positive way in which Christians have done so. For God in Christianity is conceived in His truth, and therefore, as in Himself Aoroughly concrete, as a person, as a subject,* and more closely determined, What He is as spirit unfolds itself to the religious appreas mind or spirit, hension as the Trinity of Persons, which at the same time in relation with
p- 352 supra. The Introduction to HegeTs "Philosophy of Fine Art" translated into English. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886. ' It is natural foi a reader to ask in luhat person or subject God is conceived to have It appears certain to me that Hegel, when he writes thus, is referring to the selfreality. consciousness of indvidual human beings as constituting, and reflecting on, an ideal unity between them. This may seem to put a non-natural meaning on the term "person" or "subject," as if the common element of a number of intelligences could be a single person. It is obvious that the question hinges on the degree in which a unity that is not sensuous but ideal can be effective and actual. I can only ta^ here, that the more we consider the
'
Compare
"
nature of ideal unity the higher
we
shall rate its capabilities.
471
472
itself is
APPENDIX
One.
I.
and particularity, together with only such unity that constitutes the concrete. Now, as a content in order to possess truth at all must be of this concrete nature, art demands the same concreteness, because a mere abstract universal has not in itself the vocation to advance to particularity and phenomenal manifestation and to unity with itself therein. If a true and therefore concrete content is to have corresponding to it a sensuous form and modelling, this sensuous form must, in the third place, be no less emphatically something individual, wholly concrete in itself, and one. The character of concreteness as belonging to both elements of art, to the content as to the representation, is precisely the point in which both may coincide and correspond to one another ; as, for instance, the natural shape of the human body is such a sensuous concrete as is capable of representing spirit, which is concrete in itself, and of displaying itself in conformity therewith. Therefore we ought to abandon the idea that it is a mere matter of accident that an actual phenomenon of the external world is chosen to furnish a shape thus conformable to truth. Art does not appropriate this form either because it simply finds it existing or because there is none other. The concrete content itself involves the element of external and actual, we may say indeed of sensible manifestation. But in compensation this sensuous concrete, in which a content essentially belonging to mind expresses itself, is in its own nature addressed to the inward being ; its external element of shape, whereby the content is made perceptible and imaginable, has the aim of existing purely This is the only reason for which content and for the heart and mind. artistic shape are fashioned in conformity with each other. The mere sensuous concrete, external nature as such, has not this purpose for its exclusive ground of origin. The birds' variegated plumage shines unseen, and their song dies away unheard, the Cereus * which blossoms only for a night withers without having been admired in the wilds of southern forests, and these forests, jungles of the most beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the most odorous and aromatic perfumes, perish and decay no less unenjoyed. The work of art has not such a naive self-centred being, but is essentially a question, an address to the responsive heart, an appeal to affections and to minds. Although the artistic bestowal of sensuous form is in this respect not accidental, yet on the other hand it is not the highest mode of apprehending Thought is a higher mode than representation by the spiritually concrete. means of the sensuous concrete. But although in a relative sense abstract, yet it must not be one-sided but concrete thinking, in order to be true and Whether a given content has sensuous artistic representation for its rational. adequate form, or in virtue of its nature essentially demands a higher and more spiritual embodiment, is a distinction that displays itself at once, if, for instance, we compare the Greek gods with God as conceived according to Christian ideas. The Greek god is not abstract but individual, and is closely akin to the natural human shape ; the Christian God is equally a concrete personaUty, but in the mode of pure spiritual existence, and is to be known His medium of existence is therefore essentially inas mind^ and in mind. ward knowledge and not external natural form, by means of which He can only be represented imperfectly, and not in the whole depth of His idea. But inasmuch as the task of art is to represent the idea to direct perception
Here
is essentiality, universality,
;
their reconciled unity
and
it is
Fackfl(iistd="Totch
thistle,"
Or " as
a plant of the genus Cereus, Nat. Order
Cactacea:.
snirit spirit
and in
spirit. SDirit."
APPENDIX
I.
473
in sensuous shape, and not in the form of thought or of pure spirituality as such, and seeing that this work of representation has its value and dignity in the correspondence and the unity of the two sides, i.e. of the Idea and its
plastic
embodiment,
it
follows that the level
and excellency of art
in attaining
a realization adequate to its ideal,^ must depend upon the grade of inwardness and unity with which Idea and Shape display themselves as fused into one. Thus the higher truth is spiritual being that has attained a shape adequate
to the conception of spirit. This is what furnishes the principle of division for the science of art. For before the mind can attain the true notion of its absolute essence, it has to traverse a course of stages whose ground is in this idea itself ; and to this evolution of the content with which it supplies itself, there corresponds an evolution, immediately connected therewith, of the plastic forms of art, under the shape of which the mind as artist presents to itself the consciousness of itself. This evolution within the art-spirit has again in its own nature two sides. In the first place the development itself is a spiritual * and universal one, in so far as the graduated series of definite conceptions of the world as the definite but comprehensive consciousness of nature, man and God, gives itself artistic shape ; and, in the second place, this universal development of art is obliged to provide itself with external existence and sensuous form, and the definite modes of the sensuous art-existence are themselves a totality of necessary distinctions in the realm of art ^which are tke several arts. It is true, indeed, that the necessary kinds of artistic representation are on the one hand qua spiritual of a very general nature, and not restricted to any one material ; * while sensuous existence contains manifold varieties of matter. But as this latter, like the mind, has the Idea potentially for its inner soul, it follows from this that particular sensuous materials have a close affinity and secret accord with the spiritual distinctions and types of art presentation. In its completeness, however, our science divides itself into three principal portions. Inrst, we obtain a general part. It has for its content and object the universal Idea of artistic beauty this beauty being conceived as the Ideal together with the nearer relation of the latter both to nature and to subjective artistic production. Secondly, there develops itself- out of the idea of artistic beauty a particular part, in as far as the essential differences w^hich this idea contains in itself evolve themselves into a scale oi particular plastic * forms. In the third place there results a final part, which has for its subject the individualization of artistic beauty, that consists in the advance of art to the
: the the cross division to the former, the several arts sculpture, music, poetry, etc., each having its special ground and warrant. * He is asking himself why sound or paint, etc., should correspond to one type of art as theoretically defined this being intellectual, not sensuous, at root and answers that these media qua natural objects have, though more latent than in works of art, an import and purpose of their own, which reveals itself in their suitability to particular forms of art. * " Gestaltungsfornun." I use " plastic " all through in a pregnant sense, as one speaks of plastic fancy, etc. : meaning ideally determinate, and fit for translating into pictures, These "plastic forms " are varying modifications of the subject-matter of art. poetry, etc
The idea of art. The two evolutions are, speaking roughly, (i.) that of the subject-matter ; (ii.) that of particular mode of art (i.) e.g. you have Egyptian, Greek, Christian religion, etc., with corresponding views and sentiments, each in its own relation to art ; (ii.) you have, as a
474
APPENDIX
I.
sensuous realization of its shapes and its self-completion as a system of the several arts and their genera and species, 2. With respect to the iirst part, we must begin by rec\,lling to mind, in order to make the sequel intelligible, that the Idea qua the beautiful in art is not the Idea as such, in the mode in which a metaphysical logic apprehends it as the absolute, but the Idea as developed into concrete form fit for reality, and as having entered into immediate and adequate unity with this reality. For the Idea as such, although it is the essentially and actually true, is yet the truth only in its generality which has not yet taken objective shape ; but the Idea as the beautiful in art is at once the Idea when specially determined as in its essence individual reality, and also an individual shape of reality This amounts to enunciessentially destined to embody and reveal the Idea. ating the requirement that the Idea, and its plastic mould as concrete reality, When reduced to such are to be made completely adequate to one another. form the Idea, as a reality moulded in conformity with the conception of the Idea, is the Ideal. The problem of this conformity might, to begin with, be understood in the sense that any Idea would serve, so long as the actual shape, it did not matter what shape, represented this particular Idea and no other. But if so, the required truth of the Ideal is confounded with mere correctness, which consists in the expression of any meaning whatever in appropriate fashion so that its import may be readily recognised in the shape created. The Ideal is not to be thus understood. Any content whatever may attain to being represented quite adequately, judged by the standard of its own nature, but it does not therefore gain the right to claim the artistic beauty of the Ideal. Compared indeed with ideal beauty, even the presentation will in such a case appear defective. From this point of view we must remark to begin with, what cannot be proved till later, that the defects of a work of art are not to be regarded simply as always due, for instance, to individual unskilfulness. Defectiveness of form arises from defectiveness of content. So, for example, the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians in their artistic shapes, their forms of deities, and their idols, never got beyond a formless pha.se, or one of a vicious and false definiteness of form, and were unable to attain genuine beauty ; because their mythological ideas, the content and thought of their works of art, were as yet indeterminate in themselves, or of a vicious determinateness, and did not consist in the content that is absolute irs itself. The more that works of art excel in true beauty of presentation, the more profound is the inner truth of their content and thought. And in dealing with this point, we have not to think merely perhaps of the greater or lesser skill with which the natural forms as given in external reality are apprehended and imitated. For in certain stages of art-consciousness and of representation, the distortion and disfigurement of natural structures is not unintentional technical inexpertness and want of skill, but intentional alteration, which emanates from the content that is in consciousness, and is required thereby. Thus, from this point of view, there is such a thing as imperfect art, which may be quite perfect, both technically and in other respects,
in its determinate sphere, yet reveals itself to be defective when compared with the conception of art as such, and with the Ideal. Only in the highest art are the Idea and the representation genuinely adequate to one another, in the sense that the outward shape given to the Idea is in itself essentially and actually the true shape, because the content of the Idea, which that shape expresses, is itself the true and real content. It is a corollary from this, as we indicated above, that the Idea must be defined in and through itself as con-
APPENDIX
I.
475
Crete totality, and thereby possess in itself the principle and standard of ^^s I^rticularization and determination in external appearance. For example,
the Christian imagination will be able to represent God only in human form and with man's intellectual expression, because it is herein that God Himself IS completely known in Himself as mind. Determinateness is, as it were, the bridge to phenomenal existence. Where this determinateness is not totality derived from the Idea itself, where the Idea is not conceived as self-determining and self-particularizing, the Idea remains abstract and has its determinateness, and therefore the principle that dictates its particular and exclusively appropriate mode of presentation, not in itself but external to it. Therefore, the Idea when still abstract has even its shape external, and not dictated by itself. The Idea, however, which is concrete in itself bears the principle of its mode of manifestation within itself, and is by that means the free process of giving shape to itself. Thus it is only the truly concrete Idea that can generate the true shape, and this correspondence of the two is the
Ideal.
because the Idea is in this fashion concrete unity, it follows that can enter into the art-consciousness only by the expansion and re-conciliation of the particularities of the Idea, and it is through this evolution that artistic beauty comes to possess a totality of partiailar stages and forms. Therefore, after we !iave studied the beauty of art in itself and on its own merits, we must see how beauty as a whole breaks up into its particular determinations. This gives, as our second part, the doctrine of the types of art. These forms find their genesis in the different modes of grasping the Idea as artistic content, whereby is conditioned a difference of the form in which it manifests itself. Hence the types of art are nothing but the different relations of content and shape, relations which emanate from the Idea itself, and furnish thereby the true basis of division for this sphere. For the principle of division must always be contained in that conception whose particularization and
3.
Now
this unity
division is in question. have here to consider three relations of the Idea to its outward shaping.^ (a) First, the Idea gives rise to the beginning of Art when, being itself still in its indistinctness and obscurity, or in vicious untrue determinateness, it is made the import of artistic creations. As indeterminate it does not yet possess in itself that individuality which the Ideal demands ; its abstractness and onesidedness leave its shape to be outwardly bizarre and defective. The first form of art is therefore rather a mere search after plastic portrayal than a The Idea has not yet found the true capacity of genuine representation. form even within itself, and therefore continues to be merely the struggle and In general terms we may call this form the Symbolic aspiration thereafter. form of art. In it the abstract Idea has its outward shape external to itself* in natural sensuous matter, with which the process of shaping begins, and
We
from which, qua outward expression,
it is
inseparable.
Natural objects are thus primarily left unaltered, and yet at the same time invested with the substantial Idea as their significance, so that they receive the
"
Gestaltang."
I do not thinlc this means the process of shaping, but the shapes taken
collectively.
' I.e. not in a separate ideal shape devoted to it. He means that man takes a stock or stone as representation or symbol of the divine, and as there is no real connection between divinity and the stone, it may either be left untouched and unshaped, or be hewn into any bizarre or arbitrary shape that comes to hand : see next paragraph.
476
APPENDIX
I.
vocation of expressing it, and claim to be interpreted as though the Idea itself were present in them. At the root of this is the fact that natural objects have in them an aspect in which they are capable of representing a universal meaning. But as an adequate correspondence is not yet possible, this reference can only concern an abstract attribute, as when a lion is used to mean
strength.
the other hand, this abstractness of the relation brings to consciousness Idea to natural phenomena ; and the Idea, having no other reality to express it, expatiates in all these shapes, seeks itself in them in all their unrest and proportion, but nevertheless does not find them adequate to itself. Then it proceeds to exaggerate the natural shapes and the phenomena of reality into indefiniteness and disproportion, to intoxicate itself in them, to seethe and ferment in them, to do violence to them, to distort and explode them into unnatural shapes, and strives by the variety, hugeness, and splendour of the forms employed * to exalt the phenomenon to the level of the Idea. For the Idea is here still more or less indeterminate and non-plastic, but the natural objects are in their shape thoroughly determinate. Hence, in view of the unsuitablity of the two elements to each other, the relation of the Idea to objective reality becomes a negative one, for the former, as in its nature inward,^ is unsatisfied with such an externality, and as being its inner universal substance ^ perists in exaltation or Sublimity beyond and above all this inadequate abundance of shapes. In virtue of this sublimity the natural phenomena and the human shapes and incidents are accepted, and left as they were, though at the same time understood to be inadequate to their significance, which is exalted far above every earthly content. These aspects may be pronounced in general terms to constitute the character of the primitive artistic pantheism of the East, which either charges even the meanest objects with the absolute import, or again coerces nature with violence into the expression of its view. By this means it becomes bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless, or turns the infinite but abstract freedom of the substantive Idea disdainfully against all phenomenal being as dull and evanescent. By such means the import cannot be completely embodied in the expression, and in spite of all aspiration and endeavour the reciprocal inadequacy of shape and Idea remains insuperable. This may be taken as the first form of art, Symbolic art with its aspiration, its disquiet,* its mystery
On
no
less strongly the foreignness of the
and
its
sublimity.
(;8) In the second form of art, which we propose to call " Classical" the double defect of symbolic art is cancelled. The plastic shape of symbolic art is imperfect, because, in the first place, the Idea in it only enters into consciousness in abstract determinateness or indeterminateness, and, in the second place, this must always make the conformity of shape to import defective, and in its turn merely abstract. The classical form of art is the solution of this double difficulty ; it is the free and adequate embodiment
simply verified
a
" Sie cUs Inneres." an idea or purpose which gives these partial and defective representations meaning they have, although they are incapable of really expressing it.
' I.e.
This description is probably directed, in the first place, to the Indian representation of and would apply to those of many barbaric religions. But its truth may be very in daily observation of the first attempts of the uneducated at plastic presentation of their ideas, where costliness, ingenuity, labour, or size take the place of beauty,
>
deities,
all
the
"Gahrung"\A.
"fermentation."
APPENDIX
I.
477
of the Idea the shape that, according to its conception, is peculiarlyappropriate to the Idea itself. With it, therefore, the Idea is capable of entenng into free and complete accord. Hence, the classical type of art IS the first to afford the production and intuition of the completed Ideal, and to establish it as a reaUzed fact. The conformity, however, of notion and reality in classical art must not be taken the purely formal sense of the agreement of a content with the external shape given to it, any more than this could be the case with the Ideal itself. Otherwise every copy from nature, and every type of countenance, every landscape, flower, or scene, etc., which forms the purport of any representation, would be at once made classical by the agreement which it displays between form and content. On the contrary, in classical art the peculiarity of the content consists in being itself concrete, and, as such, the concrete spiritual; for only the spiritual is the truly inner self. To suit such a content, then, we must search out that in Nature which on its own merits belongs ta the essence and actuality of the mind. It must be the absolute ^ notion that. invented the shape appropriate to concrete mind, so that the subjective notion in this case the spirit of art has merely found it, and brought it, as an existence possessing natural shape, into accord with free individual spirituality.* This shape, with which the Idea as spiritual as individually determinate spirituality invests itself when manifested as a temporal phenomenon, is the human form. Personification and anthropomorphism have often been decried as a degradation of the spiritual ; but art, in as far as its end is to bring before perception the spiritual in sensuous form, must advance to such anthropomorphism, as it is only in its proper body that mind is adequately revealed to sense. The migration of souls is in this respect a false abstraction,* and physiology ought to have made it one of its axioms that life had necessarily in its evolution to attain to the human shape, as the sole sensuous phenomenon that is appropriate to mind. The human fonn is employed in the classical type of art not as mere sensuous existence, but exclusively as the existence and physical form corresponding to mind, and is therefore exempt from all the deficiencies of what is merely sensuous, and from the contingent The outer shape must be thus purified finiteness of phenomenal existence. in order to express in itself a content adequate to itself ; and again, if the conformity of import and content is to be complete, the spiritual meanIt must, that is ing which is the content must be of a particular kind. to say, be qualified to express itself completely in the physical form of man, without projecting into another world beyond the scope of such an expression This condition has the effect that Mind is by in sensuous and bodily terms. it at once specified as a particular case of mind, as human mind, and. not as simply absolute and eternal, inasmuch as mind in this latter sense is incapable of proclaiming and expressing itself otherwise than as intellectual being.* Out of this latter point arises, in its turn, the defect which brings about
" Der ursprungliche Begriff," lit. " the original notion." God or the Universe invented man to be the expression of mind ; art_/f(/j him, and adapts his shape to the artistic embodiment of mind as concentrated in individual instances. * Because it represents the soul as independent of an appropriate body the human soul as capable of existing in a beast's body. * " Geistigkeit. "The nature of thought, mind, or spirit." It cannot be here rendered by mind or spirit, ibecause these words make us think of an isolated individual, a mind or soul, and neglect the common spiritual or intellectual nature, which is referred to by the*
' I.e.
author.
478
APPENDIX
I.
the dissolution of classical art, and demands a transition into a third and higher form, viz. into the romantic form of art. the Idea (y) The romantic form of art destroys the completed union of and its reality, and recurs, though in a higher phase, to that difference and antagonism of two aspects which was left unvanquished by symbolic art. The classical type attained the highest excellence, of which the sensuous embodiment of art is capable ; and if it is in any way defective, the defect is in art This limitation consists in the as a whole, i.e. in the limitation of its sphere. the conception of which fact that art as such takes for its object Mind is infinite concrete universality in the shape of senstious concreteness, and in the classical phase sets up the perfect amalgamation of spiritual and sensuous Now, as a matter of fact, in such an existence as a Conformity of the two. amalgamation Mind cannot be represented according to its true notion. For mind is the infinite subjectivity of the Idea, which, as absolute inwardness,* is not capable of firiding free expansion in its true nature on condition of remaining transposed into a bodily medium as the existence appropriate to it. As an escape from such a condition the romantic form of art in its turn dissolves the inseparable unity of the classical phase, because it has won a significance which goes beyond the classical form of art and its mode of expression.''' This significance if we may recall familiar ideas^-coincides with what Christianity declares to be true of God as Spirit, in contradistinction to the Greek faith in gods which forms the essential and appropriate content for classical art. In Greek art the concrete import is potentially, but not explicitly, the unity of the human and divine nature ; a unity which, just because it is purely immediate^ and not explicit, is capable of adequate manifestation in an imniediate and sensuous mode. The Greek god is the object of naive intuition and sensuous imagination. His shape is, therefore, the bodily shape of man. The circle of his power and of his being is individual and individually limited. In relation with the subject,* he is, therefore, an essence and a power with which the subject's inner being is merely in latent unity, not itself possessing this unity as inward subjective knowledge. Now the higher stage is the knowledge of this latent unity, which as latent is the import of the classical form of art, and capable of perfect representation in bodily shape. The elevation of the latent or potential into self-conscious knowledge produces an enormous difference. It is the infinite difference which, e.g., separates man as such from the animals. Man is animal, but even in his animal functions he is not confined within the latent and potential as the animal is, but becomes conscious of them, learns to know them, and raises them as, for instance, the process of digestion into selfconscious science. By this means Man breaks the boundary of merely potential and immediate consciousness, so that just for the reason that he knows himself to be animal, he ceases to be animal and, as mind, attains to self-knowledge. If in the above fashion the unity of the human and divine nature, which .in the former phase was potential, is raised from an immediate to a conscious unity, it follows that the true medium for the reality of this content is no
' It is the essence of mind or thought not to have its parts outside one another. The socalled terms of a judgment are a good instance of parts in thought which are inward to each
-other.
Florence. in the form of feeling and imaginationnot reflected upon. " ISuhject, i.e. conscious individual person.
' s I.e.
Compare Browning's Old Pictures in
APPENDIX
.
'
I.
479
.
'
longer the sensuous immediate existence of the spiritual, the human bodily shape, but self-conscious imvard intelligence?- Now, Christianity brings God before our intelligence as spirit, or mind not as particularized individual spirit, but as absolute, in spirit and in truth. And for this reason Christianity retires from the sensuousness of imagination into intellectual inwardness, and makes this, not bodily shape, the medium and actual existence of its significance. So, too, the unity of the human and divine nature is a conscious unity, only to be realized by spiritual knowledge and in spirit. Thus the new content, won by this unity, is not inseparable from sensuous representation, as if that were adequate to it, but is freed from this immediate existence, which has to be posited * as negative, absorbed, and reflected into the spiritual unity. In this way, romantic art must be considered as art transcending itself, while remaining within the artistic sphere and in artistic form. Therefore, in short, we may abide by the statement that in this third stage the object (of art) is free, concrete intellectual bemg, which has the function of revealing itself as spiritual existence for the inward * world of spirit. In conformity with such an object-matter, art cannot work for sensuous perception. It must address itself to the inward mind, which coalesces with its object simply and as though this were itself,* to the subjective inwardness, to the heart, the feeling, which, being spiritual, aspires to freedom within itself, and seeks and finds its reconciliation only in the spirit within. It is this inner woi'ld that forms the content of the romantic, and must therefore find its representation as such inward feeling, and in the show or presentation of such feeling. The world of inwardness celebrates its triumph over the outer world, and actually in the sphere of the outer and in its medium manifests this its victory, owing to which the sensuous appearance sinks into worthless-
ness.
But, on the other hand, this type of Art,^ like every other, needs an exterNow the spiritual has withdrawn into itself out of nal vehicle of expression. the external and its immediate oneness therewith. For this reason, the sensuous externality of concrete form is accepted and represented, as in Symbolic And the same measure is dealt to art, as something transient and fugitive. the subjective finite mind and will, even including the peculiarity or caprice of tlie individual, of character, action, etc., or of incident and plot. The aspect of external existence is committed to contingency, and left at the mercy of freaks of imagination, whose caprice is no more likely to mirror what is given as it is given, than to throw the shapes of the outer world into chance medley, or distort them into grotesqueness. For this external element no longer has its notion and significance, as in classical art, in its own sphere, and in its own medium. It has come to find them in the feelings, the display of which is in themselves instead of being in the external and its form of reality, and which have the power to preserve or to regain their state of reconciliation with themselves, in every accident, in every unessential circum-
" InnerlicAkeii," lit. "inwardness." Taken, considered as or determined to be negative. ' " Inward," again, does not mean merely inside our heads, but having the character of A judgment is thus "inward." spirit in that its parts are not external to one another. between things in /.e. does not keep up a distinction between percipient and object, as Goodness, nobleness, etc., are not felt to be other than or outside the mind. space.
^
5
The
romantic.
480
APPENDIX
I.
Stance that takes independent shape, in all misfortune and grief, and even in crime. Owing to this, the characteristics of symbolic art, in difference, discrepancy, and severance of Idea and plastic shape, are here reproduced, but with an essential difference. In the sphere of the romantic, the Idea, whose defectiveness in the case of the symbol produced the defect of external shape, has to reveal itself in the medium of spirit and feelings as perfected in itself. And it is because of this higher perfection that it withdraws itself from any adequate union with the external element, inasmuch as it can seek and achieve
true reality and revelation nowhere but in itself. This we may take as in the abstract the character of the symbolic, classical, and romantic forms of art, which represent the three relations of the Idea to its embodiment in the sphere of art. They consist in the aspiration after, and the attainment and transcendence of the Ideal as the true Idea of
its
beauty.
4. The third part of our subject, in contradistinction to the two just described, presupposes the conception of the Ideal, and the general types of art, inasmuch as it simply consists of their realization in particular sensuous
media. Hence we have no longer to do with the inner development of artistic beauty in conformity with its general fundamental principles. What we have to study is how these principles pass into actual existence, how they distinguish themselves in their external aspect, and how they give actuality to every element contained in the idea of beauty, separately and by itself as a work of art, and not merely as a general type. Now, what art transfers into external existence are the differences ^ proper to the idea of beauty and immanent therein. Therefore, the general types of art must reveal themselves in this third part, as before, in the character of the fundamental principle that determines the arrangement and definition of the several arts ; in other words, the species of art contain in themselves the same essential modifications as those with which we become acquainted as the general types of art. External objectivity, however, to which these forms are introduced through the medium of a sensuous and therefore particular material, affects these types in the way of making them separate into independent and so particular forms embodying their realization. For each type finds its definite character in some one definite external material, and its adequate actuality in the mode of portrayal which that prescribes. But, moreover, these types of art, being for all their determinateness, its universal forms, break the bounds of particular realization by a determinate form of art, and achieve existence in other arts as well, although in subordinate fashion. Therefore, the particular arts belong each of them specifically to one of the general types of art, and constitute its adequate external actuality ; and also they represent, each of them after its own mode of external plasticity, the totality of the types of art.* Then, speaking generally, we are dealing in this third principal division with the beautiful of art, as it unfolds itself in the several arts and in their creations into a world of actuahzed beauty. The content of this world is the beautiful, and the true beautiful, as we saw, is spiritual being in concrete shape, the Ideal ; or, more closely looked at, the absolute mind, and the
modifications naturally arising out of a principle. Sculpture is the art which corresponds â- excelleHce to the general type called Classical Art ; but there is a Symbolic kind of sculpture, and 1 suppose a Romantic or modern kind of sculpture, although neither of these types are exactly fitted to the capabilities of Sculpture
'
/.*. species,
e.g.
Thus
APPENDIX
truth
I.
481
itself. This region, that of divine truth artistically represented to perception and to feelings, forms the centre of the whole world of art. It is the independent, free, and divine plasticity, which has thoroughly mastered the external elements of form and of medium, and wears them simply as a means to manifestation of itself. Still, as the beautiful unfolds itself in this region in the character of objective reality, and in so doing distinguishes within itself its individual aspects and elements, permitting them independent particularity, it follows that this centre erects its extremes, realized in their peculiar actuality, into its own antitheses. Thus one of these extremes comes to consist in an objectivity as yet devoid of mind, in the merely natural vesture of God. At this point the external element takes plastic shape as something that has its spiritual aim and content, not in itself, but in another.^ The other extreme is the divine as inward, as something known, as the variously particularized subjective existence of the Deity ; it is the truth as operative and vital in sense, heart, and mind of individual subjects, not persisting in the mould of its external shapes, but as having returned into subjective, individual inwardness. In such a mode, the Divine is at the same time distinguished from its first manifestation as Deity, and passes thereby into the diversity of particulars which belongs to all subjective knowledge emotion, perception, and feeling. In the analogous province of religion, with which art at its highest stage is immediately connected, we conceive this same difference as follows. First, we think of the earthly natural life in its finiteness as standing on one side ; but, then, secondly, consciousness makes God its object, in which the distinction of objectivity and subjectivity is done away. And at last, thirdly, we advance from God as such to the devotion of the community, that is, to God as living and present in the subjective consciousness. Just so these three chief modifications present themselves in the world of art in independent development; (a) The Jirst of the particular arts with which, according to their funda mental principle, we have to begin, is architecture considered as a fine art. Its task lies in so manipulating external inorganic nature that it become* cognate to mind, as an artistic outer world. The material of architecture is
its immediate externality as a heavy mass subject to mechanica forms do not depart from the forms of inorganic nature, but are merely set in order in conformity with relations of the abstract understanding, In this material and in such forms, the ideal i.e. with relations of symmetry. Hence the reality as concrete spirituality does not admit of being realized. which is represented in them remains contrasted with the Idea, as something external which it has not penetrated, or has penetrated only to establish an For these reasons, the fundamental type of the fine art of abstract relation.
matter
laws,
its elf
in
and
its
the symbolical form of art. It is architecture that pioneers the adequate realization of the God, and in this its service bestows hard toil upon existing nature, in order to disentangle it from the jungle of By this means it levels a space for finitude and the abortiveness of chance. the God, gives form to his external surroundings, and builds him his temple the mmd's as a fit place for concentration of spirit, and for its direction to gathered It raises an enclosure round the assembly of those absolute objects. rain, the together, as a defence against the threatening of the storm, agamst reveals the will to assemble, although exhurricane, and wild beasts, and
building
is
way
for the
Architecture as relative to the purposes of Die ichSne ArchUectur.
life
and of religion.
II
482
ternally, yet in
it
APPENDIX
I.
With such import as this conformity with principles of art. has power to inspire its material and its forms more or less effectively, as the determinate character of the content on behalf of which it sets to work is more or less significant, more concrete or more abstract, more profound in So much, sounding its own depths, or more dim and more superficial. indeed, may architecture attempt in this respect as even to create an adequate But in artistic existence for such an import in its shapes and in its material. such a case it has already overstepped its own boundary, and is leaning to sculpture, the phase above it. For the limit of architecture lies precisely in this point, that it retains the spiritual as an inward existence over against the external forms of the art, and consequently must refer to what has soul only as to something other than its own creations. (j8) Architecture, however, as we have seen, has purified the external world, and endowed it with symmetrical order and with affinity to mind ; and the temple of the God, the house of his community, stands ready. Into this temple, then, in the second place, the God enters in the lightning-flash of individuality, which strikes and permeates the inert mass, while the infinite^ and no longer merely symmetrical form belonging to mind itself concentrates and gives shape to the corresponding bodily existence. This is the task of Sculpture. In as far as in this art the spiritual inward being which architecture can but indicate makes itself at home in the sensuous shape and its external matter, and in as far as these two sides are so adapted to one another that neither is predominant, sculpture must be assigned the classical form of art For this reason the sensuous element itself has here as its fundamental type. no expression which could not be that of the spiritual element, just as, conversely, sculpture can represent no spiritual content which does not admit throughout of being adequately presented to perception in bodily form. Sculpture should place the spirit before us in its bodily form and in immediate unity therewith at rest and in peace ; and the form should be animated by the content of spiritual individuality. And so the external sensuous matter is here no longer manipulated, either in conformity with its mechanical quality alone, as a mass possessing weight, nor in shapes belonging to the inorganic world, nor as indifferent to colour, etc. ; but it is wrought in ideal forms of the human figure, and, it must be remarked, in all three spatial dimensions. In this last respect we must claim for sculpture, that it is in it that the inward and spiritual are first revealed in their eternal repose and essential self-completeness. To such repose and unity with itself there can correspond only that external shape which itself maintains its unity and repose. And this is fulfilled by shape in its abstract spatiality.^ The spirit which sculpture represents is that which is solid in itself, not broken up in the play of trivialities and of passions ; and hence its external form too is not abandoned to any manifold phases of appearance, but appears under this one aspect only, as the abstraction of space in the whole of its dimensions. (7) Now, after architecture has erected the temple, and the hand of sculpture has supplied it with the statue of the God, then, in the third place, this god present to sense is confronted in the spacious halls of his house by the community. The community is the spiritual reflection into itself of such
1 In the sense "self-complete," "not primarily regarded as explained side," like a machine or an animal contrasted with a wheel or a limb, finite,
by anything outwhich latter are

i.e.
because they
demand explanation and supplementation from
without,
necessarily
draw
'^
attention to their
own
limit.
filling space.
I.e.
shape taken simply as an object
APPENDIX
I.
483
sensuous existence, and is the animating subjectivity and inner life which brings about the result that the determining principle for the content of art, as well as for the medium which represents it in outward form, comes to be
particularization [dispersion into various shapes, attributes, incidents, etc.], individualization, and the subjectivity which they require.^ The solid unity which the God has in sculpture breaks up into the multitudinous inner lives of individuals, whose unity is not sensuous, but purely ideal.^ It is only in this stage that God Himself comes to be really and truly
spirit in His (God's) community ; for He here begins to be a an alternation between His unity within Himself and His realization in the individual's knowledge and in its separate being, as also in the common nature and union of the multitude. In the community, God is released from the abstractness of unexpanded self-identity, as well as from the simple absorption in a bodily medium, by which sculpture represents Him. And He is thus exalted into spiritual existence and into knowledge, into the reflected* appearance which essentially displays itself as inward and as subjectivity. Therefore the higher content is now the spiritual nature, and that in its absolute shape. But the dispersion of which we have spoken reveals this at the same time as particular spiritual being, and as individual character. Now, what manifests itself in this phase as the main thing is not the serene quiescence of the God in Himself, but appearance as such, being which is for another, self-manifestation. And hence, in the phase we have reached, as all the most manifold subjectivity in its living movement and operation human passion, action, and incident, and, in general, the wide realm of spirit
the
to-and-fro,
the object of sensuous element of art has at once to show itself as made particular in itself and as adapted Media that fulfil this requirement we have in to subjective inwardness. colour, in musical sound, and finally in sound as the mere indication of inward perceptions and ideas ; and as modes of realizing the import in question by help of these media we obtain painting, music, and poetry. In this region the sensuous medium displays itself as subdivided in its own being and universally set down as ideal.* Thus it has the highest degree of conformity with the content of art, which, as such, is spiritual, and the connection of intelligible import and sensuous medium develops into closer intimacy than
human
feeling,
will,
and
its
negation,
is
for
its
own sake
artistic representation.
In conformity with
this content, the
was possible in the case of architecture and
sculpture.
The
unity attained,
in the text explain themselves if we compare, t.g. a Teniers with a " Subjectivity means that the work say, a Turner with the same. Music and poetry are stiU stronger of art appeals to our ordinary feelings, experiences, etc. Poetry especially can deal with everything. cases than painting, according to the theory. The unity of the individuals forming a church or nation is not visible, but exists in common sentiments, purposes, etc., and in the recognition of their community. C/. 3 constantly applied to consciousness, because it can look at itselt.
The terms used

statue, or
Greek
âin,
An
expression
"
Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face? ' No, Cassius ; for the eye sees not itself ^^ But by reflection, by some other things.'
'
yulius Ccesar. pronounced or made to be in the sense of Posited or laid down to be ideal ; almost in memory only, the not being; e.g. musical sound is " ideal " as existing, qua work of art, moment in which it is actually heard being fugitive; a picture, in respect of the third t.e. uses hardly dimension, which has to be read into it ; and poetry is almost wholly ideal, bubthe mind. any sensuous element, but appeals almost entirely to what exists and diversity divided," " besondert," like " particularisirt" above; because of the variety present in the mere material of colours, musical sounds, and ideas.
484
however,
is
APPENDIX
I.
a more inward unity, the weight of which is thrown wholly on the and which, in as far as form and content are compelled to particularize themselves and give themselves merely ideal existence, can only come to pass at the expense of the objective universality of the content and also of its amalgamation with the immediately sensuous element.^ The arts, then, of which form and content exalt themselves to ideality, abandon the character of symbohc architecture and the classical ideal of sculpture, and therefore borrow their type from the romantic form of art, whose mode of plasticity they are most adequately adapted to express. And they constitute a totality of arts, because the romantic type is the most consubjective side,
crete in
i.
itself."
articulation of this third spliere of the individual arts may be deteras follows. Va& first art in it, which comes next to sculpture, is painting. It employs as a medium for its content and for the plastic embodiment of that content visibility as such in as far as it is specialized in its own nature, It is true that the material employed in archii.e. as developed into colour.
The
mined
and sculpture is also visible and coloured ; but it is not, as in painting, visibility as such, not the single light which, differentiating itself in virtue of its contrast with darkness, and in combination with the latter, gives rise to
tecture
This quality of visibility, made subjective in itself and treated as needs neither, like architecture, the abstractly mechanical attribute of mass as operative in the properties of heavy matter, nor, like sculpture, the complete sensuous attributes of space, even though concentrated into organic The visibility and the rendering visible which belong to painting shapes. have their differences in a more ideal form, in the several kinds of colour, and they liberate art from the sensuous completeness in space which attaches to material things, by restricting themselves to a plane surface. On the other hand, the content also attains the most comprehensive specification. Whatever can find room in the human heart, as feeling, idea, and purpose ; whatever it is capable of shaping into act all this diversity of material is capable of entering into the varied content of painting. The whole realm of particular existence, from the highest embodiment of mind down to the most isolated object of nature, finds a place here. For it is possible even for finite nature,* in its particular scenes and phenomena, to make its appearance in the realm of art, if only some allusion to an element of mind endows it with aflfinity to thought and feeling. ii. The second art in which the romantic type realizes itself is contrasted, with painting, and is music. Its medium, though still sensuous, yet develops into still more thorough subjectivity and particularization. Music, too, treats the sensuous as ideal, and does so by negating," and ideahzing into the indicolour.*
ideal,
sense
Again, the subject of a Turner or Teniers is not objectively universal, in the simplest everywhere and for every one. ; not something that is actually and literally the same And both painting and music (immediately sensuous elements) are less completely amalgamated with the ideal, represent it more solidly and thoroughly than the statue, so far as the
'
ideal is itself external or plastic. ^ The greater affinity of romantic art with the movement and variety of the modern spirit displays itself not only in the greater flexibility of painting, music, or poetry, as compared with architecture and sculpture, but in the fact tliat the Romantic type contains these three arts at least, while the Symbolic and Classical types had only one art each. s This is drawn from Goethe's doctrine of colour, which Hegel unfortunately adopted inopposition to Newton's theory. * means landscape, principally. * "yi/7{/"/5ffiie," used pregnantly by Hegel to mean *<;M "cancel," "annul," and, "pre-
He
APPENDIX
I.
485
vidual isolation of a single point, the indifferent externality ^ of space, whose complete semblance is accepted and imitated by painting. The single point, ûa such a negativity (excluding space) is in itself a concrete and active process of negation = within the attributes of matter, in the shape of a motion and trenior of the material body within itself and in its relation to itself. Such an inchoate ideality of matter,^ which appears no longer as under the form of space, but as temporal ideality,* is sound, the sensuous set down as negated, with its abstract visibility converted into audibility, inasmuch as sound, so to speak, liberates the ideal content from its immersion in matter. This earliest inwardness of matter and inspiration of soul into it furnishes the medium for the mental inwardnessitself as yet indefinite, and for the soul * into which mind concentrates itself; and finds utterance in its tones for the heart with its whole gamut of feelings and passions. Thus music forms the centre of the romantic arts, just as sculpture represents the central point between architecture and the arts of romantic subjectivity. Thus, too, it forms the point of transition between abstract spatial sensuousness, such as painting employs, and the abstract spirituality of poetry. Music has within itself, like architecture, a relation of quantity conformable to the understanding, as the antithesis to emotion and inwardness ; and has also as its basis a solid conformity to law on the part of the tones, of their conjunction, and of their succession. iii. As regards the third and most spiritual mode of representation of the romantic art-type, we must look for it in poetry. Its characteristic peculiarity lies in the power with which it subjects to the mind and to its ideas the sensuous element from which music and painting in their degree began to liberate art. For sound, the only external matter which poetry retains, is in it no longer the feeling of the sonorous itself, but it is a sign, which by itself is void of import. And it is a sign of the idea which has become concrete in itself, and not merely of indefinite feeling and of its nuances and grades. This is how sound develops into the Word, as voice articulates in itself, whose import it is to indicate ideas and notions. The merely negative point up to which music had developed now makes its appearance as the completely concrete point, the point which is mind, the self-conscious individual, which, producing out of itself the infinite space of its ideas, unites it with the temporal character of sound. Yet this sensuous element, which in music was still immediately one with inward feeling, is in poetry separated from the content of consciousness. In poetry the mind determines this cpntent for its own sake, and apart from all else, into the shape of ideas, and though it employs sound
,
serve," " fix in mind," " idealize.'' The use of this word is a cardinal point of his dialectic. ' See Wiss. der Logik, i. 104. I know of no equivalent but ' put by," provincial Scotch *' put past." The negation of space is an attribute of music. The parts of a chord are no more in space than are the parts of a judgment. Hegel expresses this by saying that music idealizes space and concentrates it into a point. * The parts of space, though external to each other, are not distinguished by qualitative
peculiarities.
2 '
the distinctively material attribute of a sonorous body, its extension, only appears in its sound indirectly, or inferentially, by modifying the nature of the sound. It is, therefore, "idealized." * Succession in time is a degree more " ideal " than co-existence in space, because it exists solely in the medium of memory. " Geist " is rather ' " Sale : " mind on its individual side, as a particular feeling subject. mind as the common nature of intelligence. Thus in feeling and self-feeling, mind is said to concentrate itself into a soul.
"Au/hebm." " Ideality of matter: "
486
APPENDIX
I.
to express them, yet treats its solely as a symbol without value or import. Thus considered, sound may just as well be reduced to a mere letter, for the audible, like the visible, is thus depressed into a mere indication of mind.^ For this reason the proper medium of poetical representation is the poetical imagination and intellectual portrayal itself. And as this element is common to all types of art, it follows that poetry runs through them all and develops itself independently in each. Poetry is the universal art of the mind which
has become free in its own nature, and which is not tied to find its realization in external sensuous matter, but expatiates exclusively in the inner space and inner time of the ideas and feelings. Yet just in this its highest phase art ends by transcending itself, inasmuch as it abandons the medium of a harmonious embodiment of mind in sensuous form, and passes from the poetry of imagination into the prose of thought. 5. Such we may take to be the articulated totality of the particular arts, viz. the external art of architecture, the objective art of sculpture, and the subjective art of painting music and poetry. Many other classifications have been attempted, for a work of art presents so many aspects, that, as has often been For the case, first one and then another is made the basis of classification. instance, one might take the sensuous medium. Thus architecture is treated as crystallization ; sculpture, as the organic modelling of the material in its sensuous and spatial totality j painting, as the coloured surface and line while in music, space, as such, passes into the point of time possessed of content within itself, until finally the external medium is in poetry depressed into complete insignificance. Or, again, these differences have been considered with reference to their purely abstract attributes of space and time. Such abstract peculiarities of works of art may, like their material medium, be consistently explored in their characteristic traits; but they cannot be worked out as the ultimate and fundamental law, because any such aspect itself derives its origin from a higher principle, and must therefore be subordinate thereto. This higher principle we have found in the types of art symbolic, classical and romantic which are the universal stages or elements^ of the Idea of beauty itself. For symbolic art attains its most adequate reality and most complete application in architecture, in which it holds sway in the full import of its notion, and is not yet degraded to be, as it were, the inorganic nature dealt with by another art. The classical type of art, on the other hand, finds adequate realization in sculpture, while it treats architecture only as furnishing an enclosure in which it is to operate, and has not acquired the power of developing painting and music as absolute* forms for its content. The romantic type
of art, finally takes possession of painting and music, and in like
manner of poetic
' Hegel seems to accept this view. Was he insensible to sound in poetry ? Some very grotesque verses of his, preserved in his biography, go to show that his ear was not sensitive. Yet his critical estimate of poetry is usually just. Shakespeare and Sophocles were probably his favourites. And, as a matter of proportion, what he here says is true. It must be remembered that the beauty of sound in poetry is to a great extent indirect, being supplied by the passion or emotion which the ideas symbolized by the sounds arouse. The beauty of poetical sound in itself is very likely less than often supposed. It must have the capacity for receiving passionate expression ; but that is not the same as the sensuous beauty of a note or colour. If the words used in a noble poem were divested of all meaning, they would lose much, though not all, of the beauty of their sound. " Momente," Hegel's technical phrase for the stages which form ' " Stages or elements." the essential parts or factors of any idea. They make their appearance successively, but the earlier are implied and retained in the latter. ' Adequate, and so of permanent value.
APPENDIX
I.
487
representation, as substantive and unconditionally adequate modes of utterance. Poetry, however, is conformable to all types of the beautiful, and ex-
tends over them all, because the artistic imagination is its proper medium, and imagination is essential to every product that belongs to the beautiful, whatever its type may be. And, therefore, what the particular arts realize in individual works of art, are according to their abstract conception simply the universal types which It is as the external realization constitute the self-unfolding Idea of beauty. of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is being erected, whose architect and builder is the spirit of beauty as it awakens to self-knowledge, and to complete which the history of the world will need its evolution of ages.
APPENDIX
II.
The following notes on specific examples of musical expression have been furnished me by Mr. J. D. Rogers, as mentioned in the preface. They appear admirably to illustrate the conception of music, as the spirit of actions and events, suggested by Plato and Aristotle, and in modern times popularised
by Schopenhauer. 1. Schumann's In der Nacht used to summon up before my imagination the picture of the moon strugghng through the clouds on a windy night emerging and disappearing by turns then for a while reigning " apparent queen " amid white fleecy clouds, which are not sufficient to intercept its light. During two moments even this silken veil is withdrawn, only to be succeeded by a bank of black clouds, for a long time impenetrable, at last penetrated at intervals a little more irregular and with a brightness a little wilder and more meteoric than before; finally the light is put out and quenched by the storm.
;
I learnt some years afterwards that Schumann also associated this piece with a picture, the idea of which occurred to him after he had written the It was a picture portraying entire set of Fantasiestiicke to which it belongs. the story of Hero and Leander ; his picture is not incompatible with mine. In his the clouds correspond to the waves, the moon to a swimmer, buried and stifled in their troughs or flashing and calling out from their crests. Where the moon triumphs in my story, in his there is a love scene on the shore, accompanied by the distant rippling of the waves ; it seems almost as
though
"The billows
But, no
;
of cloud that around thee roll Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day."
comes the plunge back into waves blacker than before cries from the swimmer and from the shore and, finally, " night wraps up everything." * The music can be rendered after the manner of Max Miiller either into a Lunar myth, or into a Greek legend. What the moon does, and what the Greek hero did in the story, are to a great extent the same ; and music interprets that important element or attribute which is
there
tossings to
and
fro
common
2.
to both.
music seizes hold of the spirit or soul of any event or series of events, has it may be asked any composer attempted to represent God? God in the sense in which the word is used in the common phrase, " God in history," or in which God is described in Tennyson's Higher Fantheism, or Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. I reply by an instance. Brahms', German requiem has often been praised for the rich elaboration of its 3efail, its blending of the antique
If
"Von Kragen habe ich eben einen Brief Schones iiber die Phantasiestiicke und schwarmt ordentlich nach seiner ' gross u. schon die Nacht ' ware Art darin ' schrieb er, u. sein liebstes, mir beinah' auch. Spater, als ich fertigwar, habe ich zn meiner Freude die Geschichte von Hero und Leander Du kennst sie wohl. Leander schwimmt alle Nachte durch das Meer zu darin gefnnden. seiner Geliebte die auf dem Leuchtthurm wartet, mit brennender Fackel ihm den Weg zeigt. Es ist eine schone, romantische Sage. Spiel' ich ' die Nacht,' so kann ich das Bild nicht vergessen erst, wie er sich ins Meer stiirzt sie ruft er antwortet er durch die Wellen gliicklich an's Land dann die Cantilena, wo sie sich in den Armen haben dann wie er wieder fort muss, Mch nicht trennen kann bis die Nacht wieder alles in Dunkel einhiillt. Sage mir doch ob auch dir dies Bild zur Musik passt."
er schreibt mir
'
%<^-ama.m^s Jugmdbriefe, 21 April, 1838.

viel
488
APPENDIX
and modern,
But
It
II.
489
its contrapuntal devices fused in the crucible of romanticism. has yet finer and deeper merits. The solemn opening, " Blessed are they that mourn," is set to the same music as the solemn close, " Blessed are the dead." In the middle of the piece the name of God is introduced for the first, and almost the last time, to the words, "The souls of the righteous are hand." That name is translated into music by the pedal note, which " iPf'^ IS held down from beginning to end of the fugue to which these words are set. The pedal note persists, makes its presence felt throughout j is allendbnng, all-pervading ; the fugue starts from it, and finally, after many intncate wanderings, returns to it ; it is the fundamental note the foundation of the first and last chords, and, although many diiferent, and apparently incompatible, harmonies are found in the course of the fugue, these harmonies are all finally resolved into the initial harmony, of which that pedal note is at once the characteristic note and the epitome. Everything proceeds from it and returns to it ; it alone is permanent, and steadily, continuously, irresistibly self-asserting. Neither poetry nor painting nor architecture can express mysteries such as these with such searching force and directness. 3. Mozart's Mequiem,^ like Brahms', ends with the same music as it began with, and in both ihstances the words to which the music is set are quite different in the first and last number. The first number of Mozart's work represents death ; the last number represents immortality. The same agitation, the same solemnity, and, we must add, the same uncertainty clothes both ideas. There is a wonderful touch in Mozart's closing number, which seems to have escaped most writers. It can scarcely be understood without a passing reference to what precedes it. Compared with most of Mozart's works, this work stands alone for its restlessness its quigk changes from mood to " Confutatis Maledictis " begins with cursing then a prayer for mood. " Lachrymosa blessing intervenes finally, it ends in a sigh of despair.
begins sentimentally, then comes the stern march of inevitable fate, and suddenly there is a glimpse of almost voluptuous pleasure. In each of these two cases the three moods are not blended ; they succeed one another, and with a rapidity which is amazing in a writer who is usually diffuse and does not delight in contrasts. The optimistic vein is separated and viewed apart
unmistakable, and its prevailing characteristic is, that it is always in the major, not in the minor mode, and is usually a cadence. But there is another means of identifying the major mode with a happy ending, and the minor mode with an unhappy ending as those modes are used in this particular work. The " Sanctus " is a transposition of the " Dies Irae " from minor into
it is
It is, major. Wratb is the minor of beatification in Mozart's Requiem. therefore with intense, almost painful, interest that we look forward to the Will it be minor or major? Most of Mozart's devices last cadence of all. Handel, Haydn, and every comin this work are referable to older writers His last cadence of all is one which we search poser is represented by turns. for in vain in the immediately preceding centuries, although in the middle ages it was the most usual conclusion of all. There is ,no".third " in the last
chord.
Mozart's last chord
is
neither major nor minor
it
might be
either
It
comes
in the next
number, whose main themes are ephoed from the number which
we
are discussing.
Some parts of the Requiem are (it is believed) not by Mozart ; this sesthetic criticism based on the assumption that the main parts were written and the idea of the whole conceived by one author.
'
is
490
it
APPENDIX
II.
deliberately shirks answering the momentous question by quietly omitting dare not answer the terrible quesmost important constituent part. tion, which he seems to have carefully provided himself in the preceding The work is sections of the work with definite musical means for answering. anxious, fitful, and moody throughout ; as was once said of it, " it seems to
its
He
blush "
it is
pale
and rosy by turns
it
ends with a
final
culminating un-
certainty.
4. There is no better instance than that afforded by Wagner's Meistersinger, of music entering as an element of living interest into an idea or a
Here are a few typical instances of music supplying the sense which the text or the situation only hint at in a far-off inconclusive way, or else leave absolutely unexplained. (o) In the first place, it adds to our knowledge of Hans Sachs' character. At the beginning of the Second as at the beginning of the Third Act Hans Sachs is seen musing. The subject of his meditation is Walter's Spring song, " So new and yet so old." It was a love song, couched in the spirit as Hans Sachs says, in Act iii. ^which leads to elopement, not to marriage ; * it was fiery, impetuous, and reckless. The stormiest phrase in the song, "Es schwillt und schwallt," is the very phrase which made most impression upon the other Meistersinger, and also upon Hans Sachs. But the former, when they quote it or rather when the orchestra tells us it is running in their heads exaggerate its restlessness, and the pedal " G," which they interpolate, makes it undignified and unharmonious.* Hans Sachs' memory purifies and refines it; to him it presents itself as gentle, melancholy, and subdued (p. 170).-' The harmonies are richer, the rhythm graver, the love portrayed is of that sort which is longsuffering and kind; still it is the same love, the same melody, in spite of its transformation. So, too, with the other snatches from Walter's melodies ; they are all quoted accurately, but are toned down and ennobled in the quotation. Nothing brings home to one more forcibly than this, the distinction, the maturity, and the quiet grasp of Hans Sachs' artistic genius. The highest critical gift is that which enables its possessor to select wisely, and to exalt what it selects. And we hear that Hans Sachs possesses this gift in a perfect form. (j8) Again there is one point in which the music, while developing Hans Sachs' character, contains the secret upon which a leading incident in the play turns. Look at the music appropriated to Hans Sachs in his interview with Eva in the second act. It is obviously built upon a ground-bass taken from the four rising semi-tones, which play so large a part in Walter's first stillen Herd." If the music is to be trusted, Walter's invisible song, " (but audible) presence casts its shadow across the relations between Hans Sachs and Eva. But there is no suggestion of this explanation in the text. Let us follow the musical hint a little further. This series of semi-tones con stitutes a nucleus which branches out into many different directions; foi instance, it is often accompanied by a " counter-subject," or presented in i rhythmical cadence the spirit of which is happily caught by David (p. 39) when he sets it to the words, " Sorg' und Acht." Hans Sachs is presented tc
story.
Am
"Mit solchem Dicht und

Verfdhrt
Liebesfeuer
!
man wohl Tbchter zum Abenteuer

Ehestand
score.
Doch
'
fiir
liebseligen
Man andre
Of the
Wort' und Weisen fand."
Seep. 123 of the piano

piano score.
APPENDIX
"^wi. with the
II.
491
'workmanone who learns by taking trouble. Or it is linked ,^"f, kindly, easy-going phrase (see pp. 124, 314), in which Hans Sachs conveys his friendship to Walter (comp. p. Or else the counter-subject 409). contains in embryo those notesa falling 6th and rising 5th, both minor which afterwards impart such grave sadness and resigned conviction to the monologue of Wahn ! Wahn ! " in which Hans Sachs assumes the prophetic mantle, and answers the pessimistic question " Why do the people imagine a vain thing ? " by the optimistic reply" Nothing happens without it." The spmt of the monologue is not querulous, or rhetorical, or noisily impotent, hke that of false prophets ; but more like that of the Miltonic Manoa
" Nothing is here for tears, Or knock the breast ; no
Dispraise, or blame
is
;
nothing to wail weakness, no contempt, nothing but well and fair "
monologue with The content of the be an because we may quote Goethe here a change " But music
if
manner and attitude towards speculative problems ; towards Art and Work, or in M's ordinary intercourse with friends ; it throws no light on the problem, why should a recollection of Walter haunt Hans Sachs when he is with Eva ? A fourth counter-subject of semi-tones creeping in an opposite direction sometimes attends the primal phrase and
here that the secret is told. tiny gradual transformation in this phrase makes it pass into the theme which pervades Tristan and Isolde,^ while Hans Sachs is saying to Eva, " If I did win your hand, you and Walter would make a King Mark of me." The words came suddenly, almost abruptly ; but the music has from the first foreshadowed and unfolded this explanation. The music and the music alone has seized and interpreted what is the key of the
it is
Illusion ceases to only reveals Hans Sachs'
evil
it is
universal."
the
whole
(y)
situation.
is a phrase consisting of a sequence of descending 4ths and ascending 3rds, which at one time or another applies to every personage of the play, or even forms a part of what they sing. There is a glimpse of it when, Eva says to Magdalene, "Mir ist als war" ich gar wie im Traum " (20). Hans Sachs, who has a happy knack of wedding voice to verse, sings to it the words, " Mein Freund in holder Jugendzeit " (310). It is the prelude to stillen Herd," in which he describes himself as having Walter's song, " a vision of spring in winter time. The very Lehrbuben (p. 32) reproduced It is faintly echoed it in the first hurrying staccato notes of the 2nd scene. in Walter's allusion to " Singkunst " (p. 40) ; and a sequence of descending 4ths dominates the love scene of Hans Sachs and Eva in the 2nd Act (cf. It is the common bond which connects the Preislied, Beckmesser's p. 352). Serenade, and the gay Motive which recurs wherever the Masters allude to the preparations for celebrating the Johannis Fest. The intimate alliance between these two last motives is vividly illustrated by Hans Sachs, who in " Wahn Wahn " shows the Johannis Fest Motive insensibly melting into the
There
Am
twitterings
and chirrupings of Beckmesser; and
if
only those
who
play
Beckmesser's part acted with as much intelligence as fun, the audience would Put all these easily perceive the near kinship of his with Walter's prize song. attributes together and the phrase may be fairly named " the Spirit of the time and place " the Zeitgeist and Genius loci in one which breathes on all alike, just and unjust, but which only the worthiest partake worthily
* 2 series of four rising semi-tones, accompanied three descending semi-tones.
by a
counter-subject,
first
of two then of
492
APPENDIX
II.
forward
which was young and (like Watts' picture of the Zeitgeist), looking straight ; which loved graceful forms, and worshipped Art ; which anticipated the birth of spring ; and was, so to speak, the dream of young Germany, for it dreamt of " what the world would be when the years have died away." (S) Again here is a matter in which Wagner's music takes us into the very People do not sufficiently realise the way in which heart of medieval history. Wagner's Meistersinger music drives home into the hearer, not only the intimate association but the absolute identification of Art, Industry, and Religion,* which
the mediaeval guilds effected. Take the first four bars of the overture ; they are bars so stately and pompous, that even when the Lehrbuben reproduce them on the occasion of the Johannis Fest (p. 416, 417) in quick bustling time, the hearer feels that they have added a cubit to their moral stature since the time when they regarded the Johannis Fest as a kind of jolly, They are first used in the play to rollicking Bank holiday (Act ii., init). denote " the tribunal which awards the prize to the Meistersinger " (p. 22), and the impartiality which should characterise that tribunal (p. 127). On pp. 74 and 75 Pogner emphasises the high worth of Art, and the honour which Germany does to Art and on p. 108 Kothner expounds the principles on which the Meisterlied must be constructed to this phrase. The words to which it is set convey a high ideal of artistic appreciation ; an ideal which the guild of Meistersinger always aspired to and in the last scene of the play attained. The heraldic trapping and all the pomp and pageantry (pp. 24-294) ; the formalities and procedure {e.g. p. 421), the external lip -worship (see p. 408) of the guild are represented by a different phrase ; the phrase which we are discussing is appropriated to the spiritual objects and deeper meanings of its existence. And says the music these objects and deeper meanings are to the guild as a religion. They had a religious origin, and they are still religious in their character. For these four bars omitting the second only are the subject of the chorale with which the play opens ; and Hans Sachs baptizes the mastersong of Walter to the same theme. It is this union of Art and Religion in the guild emphasised as it is by their employmg the same themes which makes the laying of the scene of the first Act in the ante-chapel of the Katharinen-kirche natural and "appropriate. Peace flowed from this union. The heavy scales going in these bars in opposite directions occur several times in the play, once (p. 72) to typify the people of Niirnberg, once (p. 189) to the words " lasst uns in Ruh' verschnaufen," once to " Liebes Niirnberg Niirnberg attained rest and peace in the trades-unions so friedsam " (p. 299). whose members pursued art with religious fervour. Carlyle, after visiting Dr. Arnold at Rugby, described what he saw as " the rarest sight in the world," " a temple of industrious peace." So to the Niirnbergers their industrial guild of the Meistersinger was just this ; a temple of peace : and the music does more than merely describe it as such ; it impresses upon us, and illustrates and justifies for us this description. It takes and treats this description as the kernel and centre of the whole drama of Niirnberger life. (e) Of course Wagner uses his " Leit Motif," or " Independent Episodes,"
racteristic
or " Phrases," in very different ways, in different plays. The peculiar chaof the Meistersinger is that in it the phrases are used to add or develop ideas. Just as the action starts a new train of ideas in the intermezzo
1 " The notes of English feeling are few, but they are deep ; Industry, Art, Religion, In Wagner they are not a scale, but a chord ; they do so runs the solemn scale " Disraeli. not follow, but unite with one another.
APPENDIX
II,
493
of the Probelied.i and, in the song, " Eva aus dem Paradies," so the music lends a new sense to the character of the chief persons in the play, and the moral and intellectual atmosphere which they breathe. In the Gotterdammerung, for instance, the main use to which the music is put is to suggest absent images, to denote objects, or imitate a picturesque effect. It is brilliantly done ; for instance, the glow of the magic fire which surrounds Eriinnhilde has a sudden periodic expansion and crescendo at the end of every bar, as though some one were blowing on the furnace ; again, the Rhine daughters swim and laugh (unmassig) to the same consecutive fifths so orchestrated as to be a musical illustration of the metaphor " Floods of laughter ; " again, the hero is dubbed Knight in one phrase. Hunter in another, Gold-seeker in another, and so on Wagner christens his attributes, not his mere body, by some musical phrase ; again, there is singular appropriateness in the galloping horses (compare Berlioz' Damnation de Faust), and the horn behind the stage (compare Beethoven's Leonora), and the creeping worm (compare Haydn's Creation) ; but we feel that all this is what is more properly called programme music ; music is specialised to the suggestion of certain images and objects, just like the language of everyday life ; and however brilliant the enhanced effect is which it produces in the opera, we feel that it could be dispensed with. Language already does that duty well enough ; why bring in music to improve upon what is good, to illustrate what is clear ? Either music has a distinct duty to do, or it has no business there. This criticism only applies to the employment of " Leitmotif" in the Nibelungen Lied. It does not apply to the barbaric rhythms, the rude force, the abrupt changes, and the gorgeous harmonies which seem to me to take the hearer right back into the heart of the early Icelandic world. (^) Nor must we for one moment think that Wagner even in the MeisterHere are two instances of mortal frailty. On p. singer is a perfect artist. 189 Hans Sachs sarcastically alluded to Walter's " Hochmuth " in a phrase Wagner can usually appropriated to the officious Beckmesser (e.g. p. 125). hardly mean to insinuate that some portion of Beckmesser's spirit is passing over into Hans Sachs. Again, the sequence of descending 4ths and ascending 3rds alluded to in the above is an exact description of the horn-motive It might seem hypercritical to criticise the phrases in the Nibelungen Lied. of one play by the light of the phrases of another play ; but Wagner has And, of challenged this criticism by his allusion to Tristan and Isolde. course, the orchestration is different ; but would a great musician attach so much importance to a detail of orchestration ? Brahms, like Beethoven and Schubert, loves to sound out a phrase on every instrument of his orchestra in succession,^ and we feel that this is the real musical tradition handed down
"
In.einer Dornen-hecken
Von
Er
diirrem
Laub umrauscht,
Von Neid und Gram
verzehrt,
Musst' er sich da verstecken Der Winter Griram-bewehrt,

" e.g.
lauert und lauscht Wie er das frohe Singen
Zu Schaden konnte bringen."
From
the treble piano to the bass
drum
in the pianoforte concerto in
D minor.
494
APPENDIX
11,
to us by the great masters, and conformed to by Wagner when at his best that the identity of the phrase must be admitted, on whatever instrument or instruments it is played. And Wagner was at his best not in the Nibelungen Lied, but in the Meistersinger ; and even in the Meistersinger h& was not a perfect artist. Perhaps it is that music cannot quite do what he wanted it to do.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Bibliography of the subject is given in Guide to the Literature of Esthetics, by C. M. Gayley and F. N. Scott, Berkeley, U.S.A., i8gi. Prof. Knight's Philosophy of the Beautiftd also refers to an immense number of works, especially in recent English and American literature. The undermentioned books, except where the contrary is stated, are such as I have actually employed in preparing the present work, and are without exception such as have some genuine interest for the student, who can, I hope, ascertain from the body of my treatise for what purpose each of them
is
A fairly complete
serviceable.
a.
Historical and auxiliary to history. Complete Histories of Esthetic theory both ancient and modern: Schasler's ^Vtf/4e Geschichte der Aesthetik, 1872. 2 vols. 1218 pp. (conI.
tinuously paged).
Zimmermann
800
Aesthetik, erster, historisch-kritischer
Theil,
1858.
vol.
pp. Cf. also Erdmann's History of Philosophy. 3 vols. (E. Tr., i8go). Carriere : Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Culturentwickelung u. die Ideale der Menschheit. 5 vols. Werke 4-9, 1886. Sull/s article " .Êsthetic," in Encycl. Britannica. Part I. History, 1889. ,.,JCnight's Philosophy of the Beautiful.
b.
Partial histories of aesthetic or art-consciousness,

i.
and
auxiliary
works
Ancient.
Eduard
1834.
Miiller's
Geschichte der Theorie d.
Kunst
hei den Alten.
2 vols.
[A most thorough and valuable work, on which

founded].
Schasler's
is
largely
Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. Werke, 3-6. First published about 1765. 1833. Hirt : Geschichte der bildenden Kiinste bei den Alten. Ritter and Preller's History of Philosophy in extracts from the original
sources.
Overbeck's Die Antiken Schrift-quellen zur Geschichte

iei den Griechen. 1868. Overbeck's Geschichte d. griechischen Plasiik.
2 vols.
d.
bildenden Kiinste
2 vols. Murray's History of Greek Sculpture. Miss J. E. Harrison's Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens. R. L. Nettleship Essay on the Theory of Education in the Republic of 1880. Plato, in Abbott's Hellenica. xvui. Prof. H. Nettleship on " Latin CriiidisTa," Journal of Philology, 1890. with Introduction. Mackail's Greek Anthology, Prof. W. Wallace's Epicureanism. 1891. Prof. S. H. Butcher's Some Aspects of the Greek Genius.
A.
S.
Bernays
Zwei Abhandlungen
iiber die Aristotelische
Theorie des
Drama.
many
Britannica, with Article " Archeology," by A. S. Murray, in Encyclopcedia other articles treating of ancient writers and schools of philosophy.
495
49^
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
It is to be borne in mind that no English student ought to be content with a mere literary knowledge of the ancient art-consciousness, which he has unrivalled opportunities of studying in its products in the British Museum.
ii.
Modern.
1868, pp. 672 [beginning
Lotze's Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deulschland.
with BaumgartenJ.
Hartmann Aesthetik. Erster historisch-kritischer Theil. i886, pp. 580 [Kant to Schasler]. Lessing's Leben u. Werke, Danzel u. Gtthratter, with additions by Maltzahn and Norberger. 2 vols. 1200 pp. in all. 1880. [A very full account of the
:
literary conditions
of the German i8th century]. Pattison's Essays, on Wolf and Scaliger. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, and Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Scherer's History of German Literature. [E.Tr.]. Articles in the Encyclopcedia Britannica Scholasticism, Prof. A. Seth.
Mark
Image-worship, Rev. J. S. Black. Neo-Platonism, Prof. Harnack. The Catacombs, Rev. Canon Venables. Mosaic, \
l5!;{''""'"^'[p-f-Middleton.
Wood-carving,
)
Mural Decoration, Prof Middleton and Mr. Wm. Morris. And many articles on particular philosophers and schoolmen.
2. Systematic works, i.e., direct contributions, partial or complete, to the theory of beauty. The ancient and mediaeval writers, referred to in the text, need not be enumerated. Many important extracts from the less accessible works will be found in Ritter and Preller, and in Overbeck's Schrifiquellen ; in the latter especially under the head of Pheidias, e.g. the famous passage of Philostratus on imagination (No. 801) also Lucian's account of the Calumnia of Apelles (No. 1874). Longinus Havell's translation with introduction by A. Lang. 1890. Corneille's Works: vol. i., containing the life by Fontenelle; vol. x., containing the three " discourses " on the drama ; Voltaire's notes throughout. Lessing Zaocoon, Hamburgische Dramaturge, and Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (see too the plays Miss Sara Sampson, Minna v. Bamhelm, and
:
:
Emilia
Galotti).
Shaftesbury: " Characteristics," e,x\i ed. 1732. Burke's Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Works, vol. i. 1761. Kaimes' (Home's) Elements of Criticism. 9th ed. 181 7. Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty [I have not seen]. 1753. Reynolds in Idler, Nos. 76, 79, 82. 1758-9. Schiller: Werke 11 and 12, containing Briefs iiber die Aesthetische Erziehung d. Menschheit (also published separately in a small pamphlet), Anmuth u. Wiirde, Ueber naive u. sentimentale Dichtung, Review of Matheson's poems.
and Goethe Briefwechsel. Goethe: Deutsche Baukunst. 1773.

Schiller
:
^25.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
497
Der Sammhr
u. die Seinigen.
1797.
W.
24.
Winckelmann u. sein Jahrhundert. 1805. W. 24. Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie. Undated. W. 30. Wahrheit u. Dichtung. 181 1 fT. W. xi. Friedrich von Schlegel Essays on the Study of Greek Poetry. Werke 5. 1797. On the Language and Wisdom of the Ancient Hindus. 1813 [I have not
:
seen
this].
:
Kant
Werke (Rosenkranz* edition). Vol. iv. containing Beobachtungen iiber das Gefiihl des Schonen u. des Erhabenen, 1764 Kritik der Urtheilskraft. 1790. Schelling System des transcendentalen Idealismus. W. 3. Philosophie der Kunst. W. 5. Ueber Dante in philosophischer Beziehung, ib. Ueber das Verhaltniss der bildenden Kiinste zu der Natur. W. 7. Hegel's Briefe, Nos. 1-16. 1887.
:
and
3 vols. Geschichte der Philosophie (and E. Tr.) on Kant and Schelling. Introd. to the Aesthetic, translated by Hastie and by B. Bosanquet. Schopenhauer : Werke (German) vol. ii. Die Welt als Wille u. Vorstellung. Buck 3, Das Objekt der Kunst (E. Tr. Triibner, vol. i.). Lives of Schopenhauer by Prof. W. Wallace (see also his article in Encycl. Brit.) and by Mr.
Belfort Bax.
Aesthetik.
Herbart
Werke,
:
Zimmermann
Fechner
:
i, 2 and 8. Aesthetik, vol.
ii.
Zweiter Theil. Allegemeine Aesthetik als
Formwissenschaft.
Vorschuk
d. Aesthetik.
Edmund Gurney: "Power
of Sound"
[this
do not know
well]
and
1887. essays entitled Tertium Quid. Helmholtz: Popular Lectures \E. Tr. 1880]. " Psychology" and " Herbart " in Encycl. Brit. J. Ward : Articles Solger's Vorlesungen iiber Aesthetik, publ. 1829 [given 1819].
Solger's Erwin (Dialogue) I have not seen. 1846-7. Vischer: Aesthetik, 2 vols. Die Kunst. 4 vols. 1851-7. Kritische Gange, Nos. 5 and 6, including the Selbstkritik.
1866 and 1873.
Rosenkranz Aesthetik des Hdsslichen, pp. 451. 1853. 1884. Lotze : GrundzUge d. Aesthetik (Diktate).
:
Schasler
System
d.
Kiinste (a manual).
d.
GrundzUge der Wissenschaft

1886. Carriere
J.
:
Schonen
u.
1885. der Kunst (a small 2 vol. work/
Hartmann
Sully
: :
1859. Aesthetik, 2 vols. Zweiter systematischer Theil der Aesthetik. : " Aesthetic," in Encycl. Brit.
1887.
800 pp.
u j
Ward
vols.
H. Spencer
1 891).
" Psychology," lb. : Essays, Scientific, Political
and
,,./,,
Speculative (republished
Bain's
Mental and Moral Science.
Grant Allen : The Colour-sense. 1890. CoWvaS^QcA's Philosophy of Ornament. 1884. Rusktn s Art-TeachRuskin's works for list and estimate see Colhngwood, chapter On Nature of Gothic, m Stones of Venice ing 1892 ; note especially Painters, vol. 2. and chapter On Penetrative Imagination in Modern
:
K K
49^
Prof.
Series).
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Baldwin Brown:
The Fine Arts (Murray's University Extension
Morris; Lectures on Art, 3rd edition, 1883; also the two lectures, On the History of Pattern-desiring, and On the Lesser Arts, in the joint vol. of lectures by W. B. Richmond, Morris and others (Macmillan, 1882), entitled Lectures on Art, delivered in support of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings." See too the essays prefatory to the Catalogues of the Arts and Crafts Exhibitions. Edward Caird Essays on Literature and Philosophy. 1892. [Papers on Rousseau, Dante, Goethe and Wordsworth especially valuable. I regret that I had not the advantage of seeing these in time to profit by them.]
V.
Wm.
and
vi.
^-^
INDEX TO HISTORY OF ESTHETIC.

Abelard, 123; quoted, 144 n. Roman, 97; Byzantine,
Acanthus,
and concrete, 40 ; formal attacked by Plotinus, 116; the love of in

Plato, 53
;
natural, appreciated
writers,
by
ff.
Esthetic, true,
among
in
Greeks, 30;
early
Christian
128
28; in 292; and ethical criticism in Plato, 36 ff.; achievement of Plato, 54; and education, in Ar. 63 ; post-classical, 99 ; origin of the name, 182
Plato,
"Semblance"
Plotinus,
115;
in Schiller,
and expression in Lessing, 227 ; in Winckelmann, 249; natural in Hegel, 337 ; of symmetry differently treated, 373.
Bell, Sir
C, On
Expression, 444.
formal, criticized, 388.
Belvedere torso, when found, 191. Bernays, on tragic Katharsis, 64 ; his

relation to Lessing, 235 ff. Browning, plot and character in, 74. Burke, 203 ; anticipates Lessing, 205.
Allegory (see Symbolism), 93. Allen, Mr, Grant, 444 n. Apollo Belvedere, when found, 191. Aquinas, Thomas, 147.
Architecture,
theoretical
writers
Byzantine
;
art, 97.
modem,
invented, 96
treatment
;
by various
Schopen" quoted, arts
Carrey's drawings, 192.

Catullus,
compared, 352
17
ff. ;
Carmen
Nuptiale,
90;
hauer on, 365.

Aristotle,
"Lesbia" poems, 90;

" Poetic
;
Atys, 91.
57, 64, 71 treated of, 56 ; the
32,
what
he
of
Character versus plot in Aristotle, 70. Characteristic, in Kant, 272 ; in

ling,
pleasure
recognition, 58
poetry "scientific,"
in
Goethe and Hirt, 311 ff. ; in Schel328 ; in Schopenhauer, 368

in
59
Art, dist. Nature, 3; Aristotle, 60.
on Tragic Katharsis, 64 ff. and Nature
Zimmermann, 381
in
Ruskin,
448.
.Classification of the fine arts
/
Arts, the lesser, in Plato, 38-9.
Association, principle
of,
384
ff.
Kant, 280; Schelling, 330; Hegel, 345 ff. and App. L; Herbart, 371 j
Schasler,
Athene,
Winckelmann's
of,
favourite
419
Hartmann, 436.
statue of, 245.
Charlemagne, 139.
78; on
Chrysippus, 99.
Augustine, modernism
Beauty of Universe, 133.

Baumgarten, 182.
Beauty, in Nature and Art, 3 ; peculiar Greek view of, 17 ff.; formal
Chrysostom, 129.
VQcero, 100, 103. Colour, beauty of in Plato and Aristotle, 34; History of this idea, 135,
147
;
in Fechner, 385.
50O
INDEX TO HISTORY OF iESTHETIC.

Latin,
Comedy, the New and

serious,
86-7
Kant's Aesthetic, 265

Schelling, 334.
cpd, with
232
Hegel's view
of,
360.
Comeille, on the drama, 197.
Herbart,
account
of,
369
fF. ;
his
Dante, 152
ff.
limitation of Aesthetic, 371, 388. Hirt, on discoveries of antiquities,
De
Saussure, 216.
194.
Descartes, 176.
History of Art, Winckelmann's idea

of,
Diderot, 253.
242.
Dio Chrysostom,
108.
Diocletian's palace, 78.
Hogarth, reviewed by Lessing, 207 ; effect on Goethe, 208 ; alluded to
Dionysius the Areopagite, 140. Dirce group, when found, 191.
by Reynolds, 209. Horace, protests against descriptions

in poetry, 91.
Drama,
is
there any
now? 212-13,
at
219, 465.
Hume,
Lessing's,
178.
.
Dramaturgie,
whom
than
ten-
Huxley, Prof. T. H., 258

Iconoclastic dispute, 138
Plato's position, 139.
directed, 215.
Dualism, in Plato,
less
fatal
j
cpd. with
commonly supposed, 38
tency to Symbolism, 48.
its
Idealisation,
Economy, law
Epicurus, 83.
of,
386.
Erigena (see Scotus^.

Fechner, on geometrical beauty, 41 account of, 381 ; experiments on golden section, 382 ; laws of association
in Ar., 59, 68, 75-6; two senses of, 341. Imitation, meaning of, stretched in Greek theory, 49, 60 ; inherent in man, 68 ; Ar.'s ultimate view of it,
75
in Hegel, 340.
Jews, influence on iconoclastic dispute, 138.
and economy, 384.

its
Justinian closed schools of

78.
Athens,
Francis of Assisi, 144.
Freedom,
244.
relation to
Greek
art,
Geometrical
Aristotle,
beauty,
in
Plato
and
Kaimes, Lord (Home), 203; anticipates Lessing, 205-6. Kant, cpd. with Socrates, 45; with
Erigena, 143
;
Goethe, on
sis,"
in Fechner, 41. beauty, 6 ; on " Kathar-
35
his " Observations,"
65 J on Gothic architecture, i2o; account of, 304; his relation to Kant, 311.
Burke, 255 j his theory of the sublime, how related to Burke, 275 ; on the "normal"
related to
how
idea compared with Reynolds, 2712; idea of universal history, 284-5.
Golden Section (see Fechner), 41.

Gottsched, 201
ff.
Gregory of Nyssa, 128. Gurney, Edmund, 388 Stumpf), 390 .

Hanslick, on music, 367. " Katharsis," Hegel, on
Laocoon group, when found, 191

.
;
(see
Lessing's,
how
of,
occasioned,
221
; ;
account
221
its
ff.
215, quoted,
223
65
;
sources of
views, 225,
LeibnitE, 177.
on
Leo
the Isaurian, 138.
INDEX TO HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC.

Lessing on "Katharsis," pared with Corneille,
501
of,
64; com197 ; on
Philology,
Wolfs conception
189.
Philostratus, 109.
Pictorial Poetry in
French criticism, 201 ; account of, 216 ff. ; " Dramaturgie " quoted, 218 ; view of death, 230 ; on Aristotle, 234; "Education of the Human Race," 252; significance
of his death, 253. Lbnginus, 104.
Lucretius, 83, 100.
Germany, 214.
Plato, 17
Republic quoted, 23 ff. Philebus, 32 ff. ; Phaedo, 48 ; Gorff. ;
gias, 51. Pleasure, aesthetic,
7.
Plot, in Ar., 70.
Plotinus, III
and
Socrates, 117.
Plutarch, 106
ff.
Lysippus, his statue of Kairos, 94.
Portraits, in Plotinus, 114.
Mackail, Greek Anthology, 81 Mahaffy, quoted, 70, 164.

Material, the feeling
for,
Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, 121.

n.
Prometheus, of ^schylus, plot and

character in, 74. Purity, of colour and tone in Plato,
348.
Meleager, 79.
Metaphysical Art-Criticism Greeks, 23.

Mill, J. S., 257.
among
34
in
Kant, 269
in Hegel, 339.
of,
Renaissance, Latin character

of,
191.
Modern
126.
or Gothic Art, creation
Montfaucon, scepticism as to ancient

sculptures, 191.
Moralistic art-criticism
17-
among Greeks,
ff.j
Morris, William, quoted, 95

critical views,
his
Music, in
124 B., 454 ff. Philodemus, loi ; liturgical, 127; enPlato and
Reynolds in Idler, 209 ; alludes to Hogarth, i6. ; effect of later science on his idea of species, 210. Rosenkranz, 400. Rousseau, pioneer work of, 215. Rules of the Drama, Lessing on, 219. Ruskin and Vergil, historical sentiment in landscape, 93 n. ; on Schiller, 291 . ; on Sacrifice, 387 . ; importance of his views, 453.
St. Peter's at
in early Christian times,
lightened
Ar.,
views
of,
in
Rome,
125, 163.
78, 124.
148; in Schelling, 322; in Schopenhauer, 367 (see App. II.).

dist. Art, 3.
ff.
St.
Sophia at Constantinople,
ff.,
;
Scaliger, 188.
Schasler criticized, 166
246.
Nature,
Schelling
on Homer,
account
of,
Naturalism and Christianity, 128 Niobe Group, when found, 191.

Fainting,
early
317 ff. ; the absolute standpoint, 321; on Christianity, 324; on Dante, 325 ; cpd. w. Schopenhauer, 368.
Schiller,
Christian,
127
ff.
Dutch defended by Hegel, 343. Parthenon and Elgin Marbles, 193-4

reception
on Shakespeare's
verses suggested
ft. ;
naturalism,
299
by Lessing,
;
of
KM.
in
England,
230, 238
" Rauber," 253
ac-
442.
Pater,
Mr. Walter, Renaissance. 122
Marius, 126.
Pattison, Rev. Mark, 188. Philodemus, 100.
288 ff. ; play-theory, 294 relation to Goethe, 297. Schlegel, definition of beauty, 6, 300 influence on Schopenhauer, 364.
count
of,
Scholasticism, 140.
502
INDEX' TO HISTORY OF iESTHETIC.

Theophrastus, 82. Tones, beauty of, in Plato and Aris
totle, 34.
Schopenhauer, 363. Scotus Erigena, 131, 140.

Shaftesbury, 177.
Shakespeare, 152 fif. Sidney, Sir Philip, quoted, 154 n.

Socrates, in
Solger,
Tragedy, origin of middle class, 232. Tragic " Katharsis " in Ar. developed
Xenophon, on
ff.
art, 44.
by Lessing and Bernays, 234
ff.
394
Song-music, simple, in Plato, 36.

Soul, beautiful, in Plato, 37. Spalato, palace at, 78, 97. Species,
Ugly in 107-S 203-4

of
gel,
Aristotle, 57
;
;
in Plutarch,
; ;
in Plotinus, 115 in Lessing, 225

;
in Burke, in Schle;
doctrine
of
and
idea
"characteristic," 210.
338 and 355 in Solger, Rosenkranz, etc., 395

301
in Hegel,
fl'.
Spencer, Mr. H., the play theory, 294; law of Economy, 386 j on musical
expression, 441.
Unities, dramatic, 201.

Vergil's
naturalism,
91;
historical
Spinoza, 176.
Spon and M'heler,

Strato, 82.
192.
Sentiment, 93. Vischer, 399.

Voltaire
on the
J.,
unities, 201.
Stumpf, Professor, on music, 387. Symbolism, in Greek theory, 48-9,
Ward, Dr.
on Economy of Attenon law of Economy,
tion, 380.
60;
its
nature, dist.
allegory,
93,
Weber
386.
brothers,
127, 139, 143, 158, 253.
Sublime
104
;
(see
Longinus, Burke, Kant),
in
Winckelmann, 242.
Weisse, 395. Wieland, 214.
Succession of the arts in history, 350, 387. " Swiss " critics, 214.
Winckelmann and the Herculanean

discoveries, 193
;
desires excavation
at Pisa,
Symmetry,
117
;
criticized
the "colour
by Plotinus, and symmetry "
194 ; account of, 239 ff. compared with Bacon, 240 ; not an
abstract idealist, 245 painting, 246.
;
on modern
tradition, 135, 147.
Wolf, F. A., 189.
Technical terms, growth
of, in
Greco-
Roman
Wolff, 183.
times, 83.
Theocritus, 88.
Tlicology, Christian,
its
Zimmermann, account
relation
of,
373
eco-
to
nomy
of attention, 380.
Republic and Timseus, 47-8.
Zoilus, 102.
Butler
C'
Tanner,
The Selwood
Printing Works, Frome.
and London.
This book
It is
is
a preservadon photocopy.
made
in compliance with copyright
law
and produced on acid-free archival 60# book weight paper

which meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (pemanence

Preservation photocopying
of paper)
and binding
by
Acme Bookbinding
Charlestown, Ndassachusetts
m
1999

History of Aesthetics

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Cornell University Library

the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright

the United States on the use of the

CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 1924 086 360 587

In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University

irreparably deteriorated original.

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN &

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN

First Edition, May, 1892. Skcond Edition, April, 1904.

Butler & Tanner The Selviood Priming M^orkt Frmite and

who may find a philosophical and value of beauty in the system

leading thinkers in different periods

domain with an apparatus

not in order to interfere with the intellectual interest of his own.

but in order to satisfy an

the thoughts of great

element of the spiritual

writers included are

complain of the almost total absence of direct

reference to Oriental art, whether in the ancient world or in

moreover, necessary to limit

story with the

Dr. Gildea appeared too significant to

unused, and his authority warranted

these passages the principal materials for forming a

would have been

thought, to omit the

points of the mediseval development, both in art and in opinion, the

are familiar with the average

justifying their principles.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

connection with the definition

creation of a poetic world, and its first encounter with

for the Attitude of Reflection

how Greek Art could be called " Imitative "

Facility of Imitative Art

Hellenic Art not so Abstractly Ideal as has been thought

The Ground prepared

outlines of Greek theory concerning the

How it shows itself

p. Its ^Esthetic Value

Materials from Aristotle

6. Estimate of his meaning Concrete Criticism i. History and Elements of Drama

Plot and character-drawing

Alexandrian and Greco-Roman CULTURE TO CONSTANTINE THE GrEAT.

Character of the Period General Philosophy and Art a. Philosophy

The Idyll The Anthology

iv. Roman Poets Formative Art and Architecture

Aristarchus and Zoilus

Later Greco-Roman Critics

Thirteenth Century French Literature

Architecture and Decoration back to Sixth Century

and Song of the