Chapter XIX: Conclusion (8)

But Humboldt opposes Humboldt: amongst the old dross we detect the brilliant gleams of a wholly new concept of language. Certainly his work is for this very reason not always free from contradictions and from a kind of hesitation and awkwardness which appear characteristically in his literary style and make it at times laboured and obscure. The new man in Humboldt criticizes the old man when he says, "Languages must be considered not as dead products but as an act of production. ... Language in its reality is something continually changing and passing away. Even its preservation in writing is incomplete, a kind of mummification: it is always necessary to render the living speech sensible. Language is not a work, _ergon,_ but an activity, _energeia._ ... It is an eternally repeated effort of the spirit in order to make articulated tones capable of expressing thought." Language is the act of speaking. "True and proper language consists in the very act of producing it by means of connected utterance; that is the only thing that must be thought of as the starting-point or the truth in any inquiry which aims at penetrating into the living essence of language. Division into words and rules is a lifeless artifice of scientific analysis."[6] Language is not a thing arising out of the need of external communication; on the contrary, it springs from the wholly internal thirst for knowledge and the struggle to reach an intuition of things." From its earliest commencement it is entirely human, and extends without intention to all objects of sensory perception or internal elaboration.... Words gush spontaneously from the breast without constraint or intention: there is no nomad tribe in any desert without its songs. Taken as a zoological species, man is a singing animal which connects its thoughts with its utterances."[7] The new man leads Humboldt to discover a fact hidden from the authors of logico-universal grammars: namely the internal form of language (_innere Sprachform_), which is neither logical concept nor physical sound, but the subjective view of things formed by man, the product of imagination and feeling, the individualization of the concept. Conjunction of the internal form of language with physical sound is the work of an internal synthesis; "and here, more than anywhere else, language by its profound and mysterious operation recalls art. Sculptor and painter also unite the idea with matter, and their efforts are judged praiseworthy or not according as this union, this intimate interpenetration, is the work of true genius, or as the idea is something separate, painfully and laboriously imposed upon the matter by sheer force of brush or chisel."[8]

[Sidenote: _Language and art in Humboldt._]

But Humboldt was content to regard the procedure of artist and speaker as comparable by analogy, without proceeding to identify them. On the one hand, he was too one-sided in his view of language as a means for the development of thought (logical thought); on the other, his own æsthetic ideas, always vague and not always true, prevented his perception of the identity. Of his two principal writings on Æsthetic, that on _Beauty Masculine and Feminine_ (1795) seems to be wholly under the influence of Winckelmann, whose antithesis between beauty and expression is revived, and the opinion expressed that specific sexual characters diminish the beauty of the human body and that beauty asserts itself only by triumphing over differences of sex. His other work, which is inspired by Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothee,_ defines art as "representation of nature by means of fancy; the representation being beautiful, just because it is the work of fancy," a metamorphosis of nature carried to a higher sphere. The poet reflects the pictures of language, itself a complex of abstractions.[9] In his dissertation on Linguistic, Humboldt distinguishes poetry and prose, treating the two concepts philosophically, not by the empirical distinction between free and measured or periodic and metric language. "Poetry gives us reality in its sensible appearance, as it is felt internally and externally; but is indifferent to the character which makes it real, and even deliberately ignores that character. It presents the sensuous appearance to fancy and, by this means, leads towards the contemplation of an artistically ideal whole. Prose, on the contrary, looks in reality for the roots which attach it to existence, the cords which bind her to it: hence it fastens fact to fact and concept to concept according to the methods of the intellect, and strives towards the objective union of them all in an idea."[10] Poetry precedes prose: before producing prose, the spirit necessarily forms itself in poetry.[11] But, beside these views, some of which are profoundly true, Humboldt looks on poets as perfecters of language, and on poetry as belonging only to certain exceptional moments,[12] and makes us suspect that after all he never recognized clearly or maintained firmly that language is always poetry, and that prose (science) is a distinction not of æsthetic form but of content, that is, of logical form.

[Sidenote: _H. Steinthal. The linguistic function independent of the logical._]

Humboldt's contradictions about the concept of language lost him his principal follower, Steinthal. With the help of his master, Steinthal restated the position that language belongs not to Logic but to Psychology,[13] and in 1855 waged a gallant war against the Hegelian Becker, author of _The Organisms of Language,_ one of the last logical grammarians, who pledged himself to deduce the entire body of the Sanskrit languages from twelve cardinal concepts. Steinthal declares it is not true that one cannot think without words: the deaf-mute thinks in signs; the mathematician in formulæ. In some languages, as in Chinese, the visual element is as necessary to thought as the phonetic, if not more so.[14] In this he may have overshot the mark, and failed to establish the autonomy of expression with regard to logical thought; for his examples only confirm the fact that if we can think without words, we cannot think without expressions.[15] But he successfully demonstrates that concept and word, logical judgement and proposition, are incommensurable. The proposition is not the judgement but the representation (_Darstellung_) of a judgement; and all propositions do not represent logical judgements. It is possible to express several judgements in a single proposition. The logical divisions of judgements (the relations of concepts) find no counterpart in the grammatical divisions of propositions. "A logical form of the proposition is just as much a contradiction as the angle of a circle or the circumference of a triangle." He who talks, in so far as he talks, possesses not thoughts but language.[16]

[Sidenote: _Identity of the problems of the origin and the nature of language._]

Having thus freed language from all dependence on Logic, having repeatedly proclaimed the principle that language produces its forms independently of Logic and in the fullest autonomy,[17] and having purified Humboldt's theory from the taint of the logical grammar of Port Royal, Steinthal seeks the origin of language, recognizing, with his master, that the question of its origin is identical with that of nature of language, its psychological genesis or rather the position it occupies in evolution of the spirit. "In the matter of language there is no difference between its original creation (_Urschöpfung_) and the creation which is daily repeated."[18] Language belongs to the vast class of reflex movements; but to say that is to look at it from one side only and to omit its own essential peculiarity. Animals have reflex movements and sensations like man; but in animals the senses "are wide gates through which external nature rushes to the assault with such impetus as to overwhelm the mind and deprive it of all independence and freedom of movement." In man, however, language can arise because man is resistance to nature, conqueror of his own body, freedom incarnate: "language is liberation: even to-day we feel our mind lightened and freed from a weight when we speak." In the situation immediately preceding the production of speech man must be conceived as "accompanying all his sensations and all the intuitions received by his mind with the most lively contortions of body, attitudes of mimicry, gestures, and above all tones, articulate tones." What element of speech did he lack? One only, but a most important one: the conscious conjunction of reflex bodily movements with the excitations of his mind. If sensuous consciousness is already consciousness, it lacks the consciousness of being conscious; if it is already intuition, it is not intuition of intuition; what it lacks is in a word the internal form of speech. When that arises, there arises too its inseparable accompaniment, words. Man does not select sound: it is given him, and he takes it of necessity, instinctively, without intention or choice.[19]

[Sidenote: _Steinthal's mistaken ideas on art: his failure to unite Linguistic and Æsthetic._]

This is not the place for detailed examination of the whole of Steinthal's theory and the various phases, not always progressive, through which he travelled, especially after the beginning of his spiritual collaboration with Lazarus, with whom he studied ethnopsychology (_Völkerpsychologie_), of which they both took Linguistic to be a part.[20] But, while giving him full credit for bringing Humboldt's ideas into coherent order, and for clearly differentiating, as had never before been done, between linguistic activity and the activity of logical thought, it must be noted that Steintha! never recognized the identity of the internal form of language (which he also called the intuition of intuition, or apperception) with the æsthetic imagination. The Herbartian psychology to which he clung afforded him no clue to such a discovery. Herbart and his followers divorced psychology from logic as a normative science and never succeeded in discerning the true connection between feeling and spiritual formation, soul and spirit; they never understood that logical thought is one of these spiritual formations: an activity, not a code of external laws. The domain allotted by them to Æsthetic we already know; for them Æsthetic too was only another code of beautiful formal relations. Under the influence of these doctrines Steinthal was led to regard Art as the embellishment of thoughts, Linguistic as the science of speech, and Rhetoric or Æsthetic as a thing differing from Linguistic since it is science of fine or beautiful speaking.[21] In one of his innumerable tracts he says, "Poetics and Rhetoric both differ from Linguistic, since they are obliged to touch on many important topics before reaching language. These sciences therefore have but one section devoted to Linguistic, which is the concluding section of Syntax. Moreover Syntax has a character entirely different from Rhetoric and from Poetics; the former is occupied solely with correctness (_Richtigkeit)_ of language; the latter two sciences study beauty or grace of expression (_Schönheit oder Angemessenheit des Ausdrucks_): the principles of the first are merely grammatical, the others must consider matters outside language; for example, the disposition of the orator and so forth. To speak plainly, Syntax is to Stylistic as is the grammatical measure of the quantity of vowels to the theory of metre."[22] That speaking invariably means good or beautiful speaking, since speech that is neither good nor beautiful is not really speech,[23] and that the radical renewal of the concept of language inaugurated by Humboldt and himself must produce far-reaching effects on the cognate sciences of Poetics, Rhetoric and Æsthetic and, by transforming, unify them, never entered Steinthal's head. After all this labour and all this minute analysis, the identification of language and poetry, and of the science of language with the science of poetry, the identification of Linguistic with Æsthetic, still found its least faulty expression in the prophetic aphorisms of Giambattista Vico.

[1] _Antihermes oder philosophische Untersuchung üb. d. reine Begriff d. menschl. Sprache und die allgemeine Sprachlehre,_ Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1795.

[2] For these writers, see accounts and quotations in Loewe, _Hist, crit. gramm. univ., passim,_ and Pott, introd. to Humboldt, pp. clxxi.-ccxii.; cf. also Benfey, _Gesch. d. Sprachwiss.,_ introd.

[3] In _Philos, der Mythologie_: cf. Steinthal, _Urspr._ pp. 81-89.

[4] _Üb. d. Verschiedenheit d. menschl. Sprachbaues,_ posthumous work (2nd ed. by A. F. Pott, Berlin, 1880).

[5] _Verschiedenheit_, etc. pp. 308-310.

[6] _Verschiedenheit,_ etc., pp. 54-56.

[7] _Verschiedenheit,_ etc., pp. 25, 73-74, 79.

[8] _Op. cit._ pp. 105-118.

[9] Zimmermann, _G. d. A._ pp. 533-544.

[10] _Verschiedenheit,_ etc., pp. 326-328.

[11] _Op. cit._ pp. 239-240.

[12] _Op. cit._ pp. 205-206, 547, etc.

[13] _Grammatik, Logik und Psychologie, ihre Principien u. ihr Verhältn. z. einand.,_ Berlin, 1855.

[14] _Gramm., Log. u. Psych._ pp. 153-158.

[15] See above, pp. 28-30.

[16] _Gramm., Log. u. Psych,_ pp. 183, 195.

[17] _Einleitung i. d. Psych, u. Sprachwissenschaft_ (2nd ed., Berlin, 1881), p. 62.

[18] _Gramm., Log. u. Psych,_ p. 231.

[19] _Op. cit._ pp. 285, 292, 295-306.

[20] Steinthal, _Ursprung d. Sprache_ (4th ed. Berlin, 1888), pp. 120-124. M. Lazarus, _Das Leben der Seele,_ 1855 (Berlin, 1876-1878), vol. ii. _Zeitschrift f. Völkerpsych. u. Sprachwiss._ from 1860 onwards, edited by Steinthal and Lazarus together.

[21] _Gramm., Log. u. Psych,_ pp. 139-140, 146.

[22] _Einleit._ pp. 34-35.

[23] See above, pp. 78-79.

XIII

MINOR GERMAN ÆSTHETICIANS

[Sidenote: _Minor æstheticians in the metaphysical school._]

When we turn from the pages of methodical and serious thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Humboldt and Steinthal, we are filled with distaste by the books written in enormous quantities during the first half of the nineteenth century by disciples of Schelling and Hegel. We are fatigued and almost disgusted as we pass from this illuminating and scientific study to something which oscillates between vapid fancies and charlatanism; between the vanity of empty formulæ and the attempt, not always free from dishonesty, to employ them in order to amaze and overwhelm the reader or student.

[Sidenote: _Krause, Trahndorff, Weisse and others._]

Why should we encumber a general History of Æsthetic (which ought, certainly, to take account of aberrations from the truth, but only in so far as they indicate the general trend of contemporary thought) with the theories of such men as Krause, Trahndorff, Weisse, Deutinger, Oersted, Zeising, Eckardt and the crowd of manipulators of manuals and systems? The only one who obtained a hearing outside his native Germany was Krause, who was imported into Spain; we are justified, therefore, in leaving them to the memory or forgetfulness of their compatriots. For Krause,[1] the humanitarian, the freethinker, the theosophist, everything is organism, everything is beauty; beauty is organism, and organism is beauty: Essence, that is to say God, is one, free and entire; one, free and entire is Beauty. There is but one artist, God; but one art, the divine. The beauty of finite things is the Divinity, or rather the likeness of Divinity manifested in the finite. Beauty brings into play reason, intellect and imagination in a mode conforming to their laws, and awakens disinterested pleasure and inclination in the soul. Trahndorff,[2] describing the various degrees by which the individual seeks to grasp the essence or form of the universe (the degrees of feeling, intuition, reflexion and presentiment), and noting the insufficiency of simple theoretical knowledge till supplemented by the Will, the Will which is power (_Können_), in its three degrees of Aspiration, Faith and Love, places the Beautiful in the highest grade, in Love: it would seem, therefore, that Beauty is Love which comprehends itself. Christian Weisse[3] attempted, like Trahndorff, to reconcile the God of Christianity with the Hegelian philosophy: in his estimation the æsthetic Idea is superior to the logical, and leads to religion, to God; the idea of beauty, existing outside the sensible universe, is the reality of the concept of beauty, and, as the idea of divinity is absolute Love, so must that of Beauty be found truly in Love. The same reconciliation was attempted by the Catholic theologian Deutinger;[4] beauty, for him, is born of power (_Können_), an activity parallel with those of the knowledge of truth and the doing of good but (differing in this from knowledge, which is receptive) realizing itself in an outward movement from within, mastering the world of matter and imprinting upon it the seal of personality. An internal ideal intuition, the Idea: an external shapable matter: the power of interpenetrating internal with external, invisible with visible, ideal with real: such is Beauty. Oersted[5] (the celebrated Danish naturalist whose works were translated into German and gained him a considerable reputation in Germany) defines beauty as the objective Idea in the moment of subjective contemplation: the Idea expressed in things in so far as it reveals itself to intuition. Zeising[6] turned his attention partly to exploration of the mysteries of the golden section, and partly to speculations on Beauty, which he considered as one of the three forms of the Idea; first, the Idea which expresses itself in object and subject; secondly, the Idea as intuition; and thirdly, the Absolute which appears in the world and is conceived intuitively by the spirit. Eckardt,[7] intent on creating a theistic Æsthetic which should avoid the one-sided transcendence of deism on the one hand and the one-sided immanence of pantheism on the other, maintained that its principles must be sought not in the feelings of the contemplator, not in works of art, not in the idea of the beautiful, not in the concept of art, but in the creative spirit of the artist, the original fount of beauty; and since a creative artist cannot be conceived except as derived from the highest creative genius which is God, Eckardt invokes aid from a psychology of God (_eine Psychologie des Weltkünstlers_).

[Sidenote: _Fried. Theodor Vischer._]

If quantity is as important as quality, we must devote some space to Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the bulkiest of all German æstheticians, indeed the German æsthetician _par excellence_: after publishing a book on _The Sublime and the Comic, a contribution to the Philosophy of the Beautiful_,[8] in 1837, he produced four huge tomes on _Æsthetic as Science of the Beautiful_ between 1846 and 1857,[9] where, in hundreds of paragraphs and long observations and sub-observations, is massed a stupendous amount of æsthetic material, of matter foreign to Æsthetic, and of subjects taken haphazard from the whole thinkable universe. Vischer's work is divided into three parts: a Metaphysic of the Beautiful, which investigates the concept of Beauty in itself, no matter where and how it is realized: a treatise on concrete Beauty, which inquires into the two one-sided modes of realization, Beauty of nature and Beauty of imagination, one lacking subjective, the other lacking objective, existence: lastly, a theory of the arts, which studies the synthesis in art of the two artistic moments, the physical and psychical, the objective and subjective. It is easy to sum up Vischer's concept of æsthetic activity; it is Hegel's concept, debased. For Vischer, Beauty belongs neither to the theoretical nor to the practical activity, but is placed in a serene sphere, superior to these antitheses; that is to say in the sphere of absolute Spirit, in company with Religion and Philosophy;[10] but, in contradistinction to Hegel, Vischer assigns the first place in this sphere to Religion, the second to Art, and the third to Philosophy. Much ingenuity was devoted in those days to moving these words about like pieces on a chess-board; it has been observed that of the six possible combinations of the three terms Art, Religion and Philosophy, four were actually adopted: by Schelling, _P.R.A._; by Hegel, _A.R.P._; by Weisse, _P.A.R._; and by Vischer, _R.A.P_.[11] But Vischer himself[12] states that Wirth, author of a _System of Ethics_,[13] opted for the fifth combination, _R.P.A.,_ which leaves us but the sixth, _A.P.R.,_ unclaimed, unless (as is not improbable) some unrecognized genius seized upon it and made it the text of his system. Beauty, therefore, as the second form of the absolute Spirit, is the realization of the Idea, not as abstract concept but as union of concept and reality; and the Idea determines itself as species (_Gattung_), and every idea of a species, even on the lowest degree, is beautiful as being an integral part in the totality of Ideas; although the higher the degree of the idea the greater is its beauty.[14] Highest of all degrees is that of human personality: "in this spiritual world the Idea attains its true significance; the name of idea is given to the great moral motive powers to which the concept of species may also be applied in the sense that they stand to their restricted spheres in the same relation in which the genus stands to its species and individuals." At the head of all is the Idea of morality: "the world of moral and autonomous ends is destined to furnish the most important, the most worthy content of the Beautiful"; with the warning, however, that Beauty, in actualizing this world through intuition, excludes art having a moral tendency.[15] So Vischer proceeds now to degrade Hegel's Idea to the simple class-concept, now to couple it with the idea of the Good; now, in accord with the teaching of his master, to make it different from, yet superior to, intellect and morality.

[Sidenote: _Other tendencies._]

From the first, the Herbartian formalism was little studied and less followed: two writers, Griepenkerl in 1827 and Bobrik in 1834, made some attempt to develop and apply the cursory notes with which Herbart contented himself.[16] Schleiermacher's lectures, even before their appearance in book form, had served as basis for a series of elegant dissertations by Erich Ritter (1840)[17] (better known as a historian of philosophy); his work is of little value, for instead of dwelling on the important points of the master's doctrine Ritter brings into prominence secondary matters relating to sociability and the æsthetic fife. A penetrating critic of German Æsthetic from Baumgarten to the post-Kantian school was Wilhelm Theodor Danzel, who lived about this time and very properly rebelled against the claim to find "thought" in works of art: "Artistic thought:" he writes; "unhappy phrase, which helped to condemn an entire epoch to the Sisyphean labour of trying to reduce art to intellectual and rational thinking! The thought of a work of art is nothing save that which is contemplated in a definite way; it is not represented, as is commonly asserted, in a work of art, it is the work of art itself. Artistic thought can never be expressed by concepts and words."[18] By his early death Danzel ended the hopes he raised by his original views on the science and history of Æsthetic.

[Sidenote: _Theory of the Beautiful in nature, and that of the Modifications of Beauty._]

The post-Hegelian metaphysical Æsthetic is chiefly noteworthy for the fuller development of two theories or, to speak more accurately, of two very curious combinations of arbitrary assertion and fanciful caprice: the so-called theory of Natural Beauty, and the theory of Modifications of the Beautiful. Neither of the two had any intimate or necessary connexion with this philosophical movement, to which they are rather linked by historical or psychological causes; by the relationship between facts of pleasure and pain and the inclination towards mysticism; by the confusion arising from the really æsthetic (imaginative) quality of some representations wrongly described as observation of natural beauties; or by the scholastic and literary tradition of discussing these cases of pleasure and pain and extra-æsthetic natural beauties in books devoted to the discussion of art.[19] These metaphysicians were sometimes rather grotesque and remind one of the story told of Paisiello, that in the fury of composition he set even the stage directions of his libretto to music; bitten with the rage for construction and dialectic, they did not spare even the indexes of chaotic old books, but seized on them as suitable material for a dialectical exercise.

[Sidenote: _Development of the first theory. Herder._]

Beginning with the theory of Natural Beauty, observations on beautiful natural objects are found among the inquiries of the ancient philosophers on beauty, and especially among the mystical effusions of neo-Platonists and their followers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.[20] Less frequently such questions were introduced into treatises on Poetics: Tesauro (1654) is among the first who, in his _Cannochiale aristotelico,_ discusses not only the conceits of men, but also of God, the angels, nature and animals; and somewhat later (1707) Muratori speaks of "the beauty of matter," of which examples are "the gods, a flower, the sun, a rivulet."[21] Observations on that which is outside art and is merely natural, are made by Crousaz, by André, and especially by those authors of the eighteenth century who wrote on Beauty and Art in an empirical and gallant style.[22] It was the influence of these persons that led Kant, as we have seen, to sever the theory of beauty from that of art, specially connecting free beauty with objects of nature and those productions of man which reproduce natural beauties.[23] When the adversary of Kant's theory of Æsthetic, Herder (1800), in his sketch of an ethical system united spirit and nature, pleasure and value, feeling and intellect, he inevitably made much of natural beauty, and affirmed that everything in nature has its own beauty, the expression of its own greatest content, and that this accounts for the ascending scale of beautiful objects: beginning with. outlines, colours and tones, light and sound, and proceeding by way of flowers, water and sea, to birds, terrestrial animals, and man himself. For instance "a bird is the sum of the properties and perfections of its element, a representation of its potency, a creature of light, song and air"; amongst terrestrial animals, the ugliest are those resembling man, as the melancholy moping monkey; the most beautiful, those of perfect build, well proportioned, noble, free in action; those which express sweetness; those, in fine, which live in harmony and happiness, endowed with a perfection of their own, harmless to man.[24]

[Sidenote: _Schelling, Solger, Hegel._]

Schelling, on the contrary, utterly, denies the concept of beauty in nature, and considers that such beauty is purely accidental and that art alone supplies the norm by which it can be discovered and judged.[25] Solger also excludes natural beauty;[26] so does Hegel, who distinguishes himself not by denying it but by proceeding with the utmost inconsequence to deal at length with the beautiful in nature. It is in fact not clear whether he means that really no beauty exists in nature and that man introduces it in his vision of things, or whether natural beauty really exists though inferior in degree to the beauty of art. "The beauty of art," he says," stands higher than that of nature; it is beauty born and reborn by the work of the spirit, and spirit alone is truth and reality; hence beauty is truly beauty only when it participates in spirit and is produced therefrom. Taken in this sense, the beauty of nature appears as a mere reflexion of the beauty appertaining to spirit, as an imperfect and incomplete mode, which substantially is contained within the spirit itself." In confirmation, he adds that nobody has attempted a systematic exposition of natural beauties, whereas there actually is, from the point of view of the utility of natural objects, a _materia medica_[27] But the second chapter of the first part of his Æsthetic is devoted precisely to natural Beauty on the ground that, in order to grasp the idea of artistic beauty in its entirety, three stages must be traversed: beauty in general, natural beauty (whose defects show the necessity for art), and, lastly, the Idea; "the first existence of the Idea is nature, and its first beauty is natural beauty." This beauty, which is beauty for us and not for itself, has several phases, from that in which the concept is immersed in matter to the point of disappearing, such as physical facts and isolated mechanisms, to that higher phase in which physical facts are united in systems (_e.g._ the solar system); but the Idea first reaches a true and real existence in organic facts, in the living creature. And even the living creature is liable to the distinction between beautiful and ugly; for example, among animals, the sloth, trailing itself laboriously and incapable of animation or activity, displeases us by its apathetic somnolence; nor can beauty be found in amphibians or in many kinds of fish, or in crocodiles, or toads, as well as in many insects and especially in those equivocal creatures which express a transition from one i class to another, such as the ornithorhyncus, a mixture of bird and beast.[28] These samples may suffice to show the general trend of Hegel's doctrine of natural beauty; elsewhere he discusses the external beauty of abstract form, regularity, symmetry, harmony, etc., which are; precisely the concepts which the formalism of Herbart placed in the heaven of the Ideas of the Beautiful.

[Sidenote: _Schleiermacher._]

Schleiermacher, who praised Hegel for his attempt to exclude natural beauty from his Æsthetic, excluded it from his own not verbally but actually, by confining his attention to the artistic perfection of the internal image formed by the energy of the human spirit.[29] But the so-called Feeling for Nature which came in with Romanticism, and the _Cosmos_ and other descriptive works of Humboldt,[30] directed attention increasingly to the impressions awakened by natural facts.

[Sidenote: _Alexander Humboldt._]

This led to the compilation of those systematic lists of natural beauties whose impossibility had been proclaimed by Hegel, though he himself had furnished an example of them; amongst others, Bratranek published an _Æsthetic of the Vegetable World._[31]

[Sidenote: _Vischer's "Æsthetic Physics."_]

The best-known and most widely circulated treatment of the subject was contained in this very work of Vischer's; who following Hegel's example devoted a section of his _Æsthetic,_ as we have seen, to the objective existence of Beauty, _i.e._ to the Beauty of nature, and entitled it by the perhaps new and certainly characteristic name of Æsthetic Physics (_ästhetische Physik_). This Æsthetic Physics comprised the beauty of inorganic nature (light, heat, air, water, earth); organic nature, with its four vegetable types and its animals vertebrate and invertebrate; and beauty of human beings, divided into generic and historic. The generic was subdivided into sections on the beauty of general forms (age, sex, conditions, love, marriage, family); of special forms (races, peoples, culture, political life); and of individual forms (temperament and character). Historical beauty included that of ancient history (Oriental, Greek, Roman), of Mediæval or Germanic, and of modern times; because, according to Vischer, it was the duty of Æsthetic to cast a glance over universal history before summing up the different degrees of the beautiful according to the varying phases of the struggle for freedom against nature.[32]

[Sidenote: _The Theory of the Modifications of Beauty. From antiquity to the eighteenth century._]

As regards the Modifications of Beauty, it should be remembered that the ancient manuals of Poetics, and more frequently those of Rhetoric, contained more or less scientific definitions of psychological states and facts; Aristotle attempted in his _Poetics_ to determine the nature of a tragic action or personality, and sketched a definition of the comic; in his Rhetoric he writes at considerable length of wit;[33] sections of the _De oratore_ of Cicero and the _Institutions_ of Quintilian[34] are devoted to wit and the comic; the lofty style was the subject of a lost treatise of Cæcilius, which anticipated that attributed to Longinus, whose title was translated in modern times as _De sublimitate_ or _On the Sublime._ Following the example of the ancients, this kind of medley was perpetuated by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; whole treatises on the comic are incorporated in, for instance, the _Argutezza_ of Matteo Pellegrini (1639) and the _Cannochiale_ of Tesauro. La Bruyère treated of the sublime[35] and Boileau by his translation gave a fresh vogue to Longinus: the following century saw Burke inquiring into the origin of our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, and deriving the former from the instinct for sociability, the latter from that of self-preservation; he also tried to define ugliness, grace, elegance and extraordinary beauty; Home, in his celebrated _Elements of Criticism,_ discussed grandeur, sublimity, the ridiculous, wit, dignity and grace: Mendelssohn discussed sublimity, dignity and grace in fine art, and described some of these facts as due to mixed feelings, in which he was followed by Lessing[36] and others: Sulzer welcomed all these various concepts into his æsthetic encyclopædia and collected round them an elaborate bibliography. A new and curious meaning of the word humour reached the continent from England at this time. Its original meaning was simply "temperament," and sometimes "spirit," or "wit" ("_belli umori_" in Italy; in the seventeenth century there was in Rome an Academy of _Umoristi_). Voltaire introduced it into France and wrote in 1761, "_Les Anglais ont un terme pour signifier cette plaisanterie, ce vrai comique, cette gaieté, cette urbanité, ces saillies, qui échappent à un homme sans qu'il s'en doute; et ils rendent cette idée par le mot_ humour ...";[37] in 1767 Lessing distinguishes humour from the German _Laune_ (caprice, whim),[38] a distinction maintained by Herder in 1769 in opposition to Riedel who had confused the terms.[39]

[Sidenote: _Kant and the post-Kantians._]

Accustomed to find all these subjects treated in the same book, philosophers at first theorized about them all without attempting to link them up together by introducing an artificial logical connexion. Kant, who had already in imitation of Burke written in 1764 a dissertation on the beautiful and the sublime, ingenuously remarked in the course of his lectures on Logic in 1771 that the beautiful and the æsthetic are not identical, because "the sublime also belongs to Æsthetic";[40] and in his _Critique of Judgment,_ while treating of the comic in a mere digression (a magnificent piece of psychological analysis)[41] places side by side with and as if on an equality with the "Analytic of Beauty," an "Analytic of the Sublime."[42] We may note in passing that, before the publication of the third Critique, Heydenreich arrived at the same doctrine of the sublime which is contained in Kant's book.[43] Did Kant ever think of uniting the beautiful and the sublime and deducing them from a single concept? Apparently not. By his declaration that the principle of beauty must be sought outside ourselves, and that of the sublime within us, he tacitly assumes that the two objects are wholly disparate. In 1805 Ast, a follower of Schelling, declared the necessity of overcoming what he called the Kantian dualism of the beautiful and the sublime:[44] others reproached Kant with having treated the comic by the psychological, not the metaphysical, method. Schiller wrote a series of dissertations on the tragic, the sentimental, the ingenuous, the sublime, the pathetic, the trivial, the low, the dignified and the graceful, and their varieties, the fascinating, the majestic, the grave, and the solemn. Another artist, Jean Paul Richter, discoursed at great length on wit and humour, described by him as the romantic comic, or the sublime reversed (_umgekehrte Erhabene)_.[45]

Herbart, in virtue of his formalistic principle, asserts that all these concepts are irrelevant to Æsthetic; he attributes them to the work of art, not to pure beauty;[46] Schleiermacher comes to the same conclusion, but for much better reasons, as a result of his sane conception of art. Amongst other things he observes: "It is usual to describe the beautiful and the sublime as two kinds of artistic perfection; and so accustomed have we grown to the union of these two concepts that we must make an effort to convince ourselves how very far they are from being co-ordinate or from together exhausting the concept of artistic perfection"; he regrets that even the best æstheticians should give rhetorical descriptions of them instead of demonstrating them. "The thing," says he, "is not right and just" (_hat keine Richtigkeit_), and he proceeds to exclude the whole subject from his Æsthetic,[47] as he had done previously in the case of natural beauty. Other philosophers, however, clung persistently to their search for a connexion between these various concepts, and called in dialectic to help them. The habit of applying dialectic to empirical concepts affected everybody at that time; even the great enemy of dialectic, Herbart, showed the cloven hoof, when in order to explain the union of different æsthetic ideas in the beautiful he appealed to the formula "they lose regularity in order to regain it."[48] Schelling asserted that the sublime is the infinite in the finite, and the beautiful the finite in the infinite, adding that the absolutely sublime includes the beautiful, and the beautiful the sublime;[49] and Ast, whom we have mentioned already, spoke of a masculine, positive element, which is the sublime, and a feminine, negative element which is the graceful and pleasing: between which there is a contrast and a struggle.

[Sidenote: _Culmination of the development._]

These exercises in dialectical system-building developed and increased till about the middle of the nineteenth century they assumed two distinct forms whose history must here be shortly outlined.

[Sidenote: _Double form of the theory. The overcoming of the ugly. Solger, Weisse and others._]

The first form may be called the Overcoming of the Ugly. This theory conceives the comic, the sublime, the tragic, the humorous, and so forth, as so many engagements in the war between the Ugly and the Beautiful, wherein the latter was invariably victorious, and arose by means of this war to more and more lofty and complex manifestations. The second form of the theory may be described as the Passage from Abstract to Concrete; it held that Beauty cannot emerge from the abstract, cannot become this or that concrete beauty, except by particularizing itself in the comic, tragic, sublime, humorous, or some other modification. The first form was already well developed in Solgei, an adherent of the romantic theory of Irony: but historically it presupposes the æsthetic theory of the Ugly, first sketched by Friedrich Schlegel in 1797. We have already noted that Schlegel considered the characteristic or interesting, not the beautiful, to be the principle of modern art; hence the importance attached by him to the piquant, the striking (_frappant_), the daring, the cruel, the ugly.[50] Solger found here the basis for his dialectic; amongst other things he maintains that the finite, earthly element may be dissolved and absorbed in the divine, which constitutes the tragic: or else the divine element may be entirely corrupted by the earthly, producing the comic.[51] These methods of Solger were followed by Weisse (1830), and by Ruge (1837); for the former, ugliness is "the immediate existence of beauty" which is overcome in the sublime and the comic; for the latter, the effort to achieve the Idea, or the Idea searching for itself, generates the sublime; when the Idea loses instead of discovering itself, ugliness is produced; when the Idea rediscovers itself and rises out of ugliness to new life, the comic.[52] A whole treatise entitled _The Æsthetic of the Ugly_[53] was published by Rosenkranz in 1853, presenting this concept as intermediate between the beautiful and the comic, and tracing it from its first origin to that "sort of perfection" it attains in the satanic. Passing from the common (_Gemeine)_ which is the petty, the weak, the low, and the sub-species of the low, viz. the usual, the casual, the arbitrary and the crude, Rosenkranz goes on to describe the repugnant, trisected into the awkward, the dead and empty, and the horrible: thus he proceeds from tripartition to tripartition, dividing the horrible into the absurd, the nauseating and the wicked: the wicked into criminal, spectral and diabolical: the diabolical into demoniac, magical and satanic. He opposes the childish notion that ugliness acts as a foil to beauty in art, and justifies its introduction by the necessity for art to represent the entire appearance of the Idea; on the other hand he admits that the ugly is not on the same level as the beautiful, for, if the beautiful can stand by itself alone, the other cannot do so and must always be reflected by and in the beautiful.[54]

[Sidenote: _Passage from abstract to concrete: Vischer._]

The second form prevailed with Vischer. The following extract will serve as an illustration of his manner: "The Idea arouses itself from the tranquil unity in which it was fused with the appearance and pushes onward, affirming, in face of its own finitude, its infinity"; this rebellion and transcendence is the sublime. "But Beauty demands full satisfaction for this disruption of its harmony: the violated right of the image must be reasserted: this can be accomplished only by means of a fresh contradiction, that is to say by the negative position now taken up by the image towards the Idea by rejecting all interpenetration with it and by affirming its own separate existence as the whole"; this second moment is the comic, negation of a negation.[55] The same process is further enriched and complicated by Zeising, who compares the modifications of Beauty to the refraction of colours: the three primary modifications, the sublime, the attractive and the humorous, correspond with the primary colours violet, orange and green; the three secondary, pure beauty, comic and tragic, to the colours red, yellow and blue. Each of these six modifications (exactly like the degrees of the Ugly in Rosenkranz) branches out, like fireworks, into three rays: pure beauty into the decorous, noble and pleasing: the attractive into graceful, interesting and piquant: the comic into buffoonery, the diverting and burlesque: the humorous into the quaint, capricious and melancholy: the tragic into the moving, pathetic and demoniac: the sublime into the glorious, majestic and imposing.[56]

[Sidenote: _The Legend of Sir Purebeauty._]

All the works of this period on Æsthetic are filled in this way with the _gest, chanson_ or romaunt of the knight Sir Purebeauty (_Reinschon)_ and his extraordinary adventures, recounted in two conflicting versions. According to one story, Sir Purebeauty is constrained to abandon his beloved leisure by the Mephistophelean devices of the temptress Ugliness, who leads him into countless dangers from which he invariably emerges victorious; his victories and successes (his Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena) are called the Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous and so forth. The other story tells how the knight, bored by his life of loneliness, sallies forth purposely to seek adversaries and occasions for fighting; he is always vanquished, but even in his overthrow _ferum victorem capit,_ he transforms and irradiates the enemy. Beyond this artificial mythology, this legend composed without the least imagination or literary skill, this miserably dull tale, it is vain to look for anything whatever in the much elaborated theory of German æstheticians known as the Modifications of Beauty.

[1] _Abriss der Ästhetik,_ post. 1837; _Vorlesung üb. Ästh._ (1828-1829), post. 1882.

[2] _Ästhetik,_ Berlin, 1827.

[3] _Ästhetik,_ Leipzig, 1830; _System d. Ästh.,_ lectures, post. Leipzig, 1872.

[4] _Kunstlehre,_ Ratisbon, 1845-1846 (_Grundlinien einer positiven Philosophie,_ vols. iv. v.).

[5] _Der Geist in der Natur,_ 1850-1851; _Neue Beitrage z. d. Geist i. d. Natur,_ post. 1855.

[6] _Ästhetische Forschungen,_ Frankfurt a. M. 1855.

[7] _Die theistische Begründung d. Ästhetik im Gegensatz z. d. pantheistichen,_ Jena, 1857; same author, _Vorschule d. Ästh.,_ Karlsruhe, 1864-1865.

[8] _Üb. d. Erhabene u. Komische,_ Stuttgart, 1837.

[9] _Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft d. Schönen,_ Reutlingen, Leipzig and Stuttgart, 1846-1857, 3 parts in 4 vols.

[10] _Ästh._ introd. §§ 2-5.

[11] Hartmann, _Dtsch. Ästh. s. Kant,_ p. 217, note.

[12] _Ästh._ introd. § 5.

[13] _System der spekulativen Ethik,_ Heilbronn, 1841-1842.

[14] _Ästh._ §§ 15-17.

[15] _Op. cit._ §§ 19-24.

[16] Griepenkerl, _Lehrb. d. Ästh.,_ Brunswick, 1827. Bobrik, _Freie Verträge üb. Ästh.,_ Zürich, 1834.

[17] _Üb. d. Principien d. Ästh.,_ Kiel, 1840.

[18] _Ges. Aufs._ pp. 216-221.

[19] See above, pp. 87-93.

[20] See above, pp. 179-180.

[21] _Cannochiale arist._ ch. 3: _Perfetta poesia,_ bk. I. chs. 6, 8.

[22] See above, pp. 205-206, 258-261.

[23] See above, pp. 275-277.

[24] _Kaligone, op. cit._ pp. 55-90.

[25] _System d. transcend. Ideal,_ part vi. § 2.

[26] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ p. 4.

[27] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ I. pp. 4-5.

[28] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ I. pp. 148-180.

[29] _Op. cit._ introd.

[30] _Ansichten der Natur,_ 1088; _Kosmos,_ 1845-1858.

[31] _Ästhetik. Pflanzenwelt,_ Leipzig, 1853.

[32] _Ästh._ § 341.

[33] _Poet._ 5. 13-14; _Rhet._ iii. 10, 18.

[34] _De orat._ ii. 54-71; _Inst. orat._ vi. 3.

[35] _Caractères,_ I.

[36] _Hamb. Dramat._ Nos. 74-75.

[37] Letter to abbé d'Olivet, August 20, 1761.

[38] _Hamb. Dramat._ No. 93; in _Werke, ed. cit._ xii. pp. 170-171, note.

[39] _Kritische Wälder,_ in _Werke, ed. cit._ iv. pp. 182-186.

[40] Schlapp, _op. cit._ p. 55.

[41] _Kr. d. Urth., Anmerkung,_ § 54.

[42] _Op. cit._ bk. ii. §§ 23-29.

[43] _System d. Ästh._ introd. p. xxxvi _n._

[44] _System der Kunstlehre:_ cf. Hartmann, _op. cit._ p. 387.

[45] _Vorschule d. Ästh._ chs. 6-9.

[46] See above, pp. 309-310.

[47] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ p. 240 _seqq._

[48] Cf. Zimmermann, _G. d. Ästh._ p. 788.

[49] _Philos, d. Kunst,_ §§ 65-66.

[50] Cf. Hartmann, _Deutsch. Ästh. s. Kant,_ pp. 363-364.

[51] _Vorles üb. Ästh._ p. 85.

[52] _Neue Vorschule d. Ästh._ Halle, 1837.

[53] K. Rosenkranz, _Ästhetik des Hässlichen,_ Kœnigsberg, 1853.

[54] _Ästh. d. Hässl._ pp. 36-40.

[55] _Ästh._ §§ 83-84, 154-155.

[56] _Ästh. Forsch._ p. 413.

XIV

ÆSTHETIC IN FRANCE, ENGLAND AND ITALY DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: _Æsthetic movement in France: Cousin, Jouffroy._]

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century German thought, notwithstanding the glaring errors which vitiated it, and were soon to bring about a violent and indeed exaggerated reaction, must on the whole be awarded the foremost place in the general history of European thought as well as in the individual study of Æsthetic, the contemporary philosophy of other countries standing on an inferior level of the second and third degree. France still lay under the dominion of the sensationalism of Condillac and, at the opening of the century, was quite incapable of grasping the spiritual activity of art. A faint gleam of Winckelmann's abstract spiritualism just appears in the theories of Quatremère de Quincy, who, in criticism of Émeric-David (in his turn a critic of ideal beauty and an adherent of the imitation of nature),[1] maintained that the arts of design have pure beauty, devoid of individual character, as their objective; they depict man and not; men.[2] Some sensationalists, such as Bonstetten, vainly endeavoured to trace the peculiar processes of imagination in life and in art.[3] Followers of the orthodox spiritualism of the French universities date the beginning of a new era, and the foundation of Æsthetic in France, to 1818, the year when Victor Cousin first delivered at the Sorbonne his lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good, which later formed his book with the same name, frequently reprinted.[4] These lectures of Cousin are but poor stuff, although some scraps of Kant are to be found in them here and there; he denies the identity of the beautiful with the pleasant or useful, and substitutes the affirmation of a threefold beauty, physical, intellectual and moral, the last being the true ideal beauty, having its foundations in God; he says that art expresses ideal Beauty, the infinite, God, that genius is the power of creation, and that taste is a mixture of fancy, sentiment and reason.[5] Academic phrases all of them; pompous and void and, for that very reason, well received. Of much greater value were the lectures on Æsthetic delivered by Théodore Jouffroy in 1822, before a small audience, and published posthumously in 1843.[6] Jouffroy allowed a beauty of expression, to be found alike in art and nature: a beauty of imitation, consisting in the perfect accuracy with which a model is reproduced: a beauty of idealisation, which reproduces the model, accentuating a particular quality in order to give it greater significance: and, finally, a beauty of the invisible or of content, reducible to force (physical, sensible, intellectual, moral), which, as force, awakens sympathy. Ugliness is the negation of this sympathetic beauty; its species or modifications are the sublime and the graceful. One sees that Jouffroy did not succeed in isolating the strictly æsthetic fact in his analysis and gave, instead of a scientific system, little beyond explanations of the use of words. He could not see or understand that expression, imitation and idealization are identical with each other and with artistic activity. Moreover he had many curious ideas, chiefly concerning expression. He said that if we were to see a drunkard with all the most disgusting symptoms of intoxication on a road where there was also an unhewn rock, we should be pleased by the drunken man, since he had expression, and not by the rock, since it had none. Beside Jouffroy, whose theories, crude and immature though they be, reveal an inquiring mind, it is hardly worth while to cite Lamennais,[7] who like Cousin regarded art as the manifestation of the infinite through the finite, of the absolute through the relative. French Romanticism in de Bonald, de Barante and Mme. de Staël had defined literature as "the expression of society," had honoured, under German influence, the characteristic and the grotesque,[8] and had proclaimed the independence of art by means of the formula "art for art's sake"; but these vague affirmations or aphorisms did not supersede, philosophically speaking, the old doctrine of the "imitation of nature."

[Sidenote: _English Æsthetic._]

In England associationistic psychology still flourished (and has continued to flourish uninterruptedly), unable to emancipate itself wholly from sensationalism or to understand imagination. Dugald Stewart[9] had recourse to the wretched expedient of establishing two forms of association: one of accidental associations, the other of associations innate in human nature and therefore common to all mankind. England did not escape German influence, as appears, for example, in Coleridge, to whom we owe a saner concept of poetry and the difference between it and science[10] (in collaboration with the poet Wordsworth), and in Carlyle, who placed intellect lower than imagination, "organ of the Divine." The most noteworthy English æsthetic essay of this period is the _Defence of Poetry_ by Shelley (1821),[11] containing profound, if not very systematic, views on the distinctions between reason and imagination, prose and poetry; on primitive language and the faculty of poetic objectification which enshrines and preserves "the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

[Sidenote: _Italian Æsthetic._]

In Italy, where neither Parini nor Foscolo[12] had been able to shake off the fetters of the old doctrines (although the latter, in his later writings, was in several ways an innovator in literary criticism), many treatises and essays on Æsthetic were published during the earlier decades of the century, the greater part showing the influence of Condillac's sensationalism, which had a great vogue in Italy. Such authors as Delfico, Malaspina, Cicognara, Talia, Pasquali, Visconti and Bonacci belong more exclusively to the special, or rather, the anecdotal, history of Italian philosophy. Now and then, however, one comes across remarks that are not wholly contemptible, as in Melchiorre Delfico (1818) who, after wandering aimlessly hither and thither, fixes on the principle of expression, observing, "If it were possible to establish that expression is always an element in the beautiful, it would be a legitimate inference to regard it as the real characteristic of beauty, _i.e._ a condition without which the beautiful could not exist, and the pleasing modification which arouses the sentiment of beauty could not take place in us"; he tries to develop this principle by asserting that all other characters (order, harmony, proportion, symmetry, simplicity, unity and variety) have significance only by their subordination to the principle of expression.[13] In opposition to Malaspina's definition of beauty as "pleasure born of a representation"; and in opposition to the then fashionable threefold division of beauty into sensible, moral and intellectual, a critic of Malaspina observed that if beauty be representation, it is inconceivable that there should be intellectual beauty, which would be intelligible but not presentable.[14] Nor must Pasquale Balestrieri be forgotten; he was a student of medicine who in 1847 tried to construct an Æsthetic of an exact or mathematical kind, with neither better nor worse result than many famous authors in other countries. He noticed, while turning his algebraical expressions into numerals, that such general formulæ "fulfil their object with an infinite number of systems of different ciphers"; and that in art there is an element "not arbitrary, but unknown."[15] Works by German authors were frequently translated at this time, some of them, for example the writings of the two Schlegels, being reprinted several times; the _Æsthetic_ of Bouterweck, deriving from Kant and Schiller,[16] was read and discussed; Colecchi gave an excellent statement of the æsthetic doctrines of Kant;[17] and in 1831 a certain Lichtenthal adapted the _Æsthetic_ of Franz Ficker[18] to the use of Italian readers; later the same book was fully translated by another hand; some of Schelling's writings were translated, _e.g._ his discourses on the relation between figurative art and nature.

[Sidenote: _Rosmini and Gioberti._]