Chapter III: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (4)

Lessing's attention was drawn to the problem, through his desire to disprove the assertions of Spence and of the Comte de Caylus, the former in respect to the close union between poetry and painting in antiquity, the latter as believing that a poem was good according to the number of subjects which it should afford the painter. Lessing argued thus: Painting manifests itself in space, poetry in time: the mode of manifestation of painting is through objects which coexist, that of poetry through objects which are consecutive. The objects which coexist, or whose parts are coexistent, are called bodies. Bodies, then, owing to their visibility, are the true objects of painting. Objects which are consecutive, or whose parts are consecutive, are called, in general, actions. Actions, then, are the suitable object of poetry. He admitted that painting might represent an action, but only by means of bodies which make allusion to it; that poetry can represent bodies, but only by means of actions. Returning to this theme, he explained the action or movement in painting as added by our imagination. Lessing was greatly preoccupied with the naturalness and the unnaturalness of signs, which is tantamount to saying that he believed each art to be strictly limited to certain modes of expression, which are only overstepped at the cost of coherency. In the appendix to his _Laocoön_, he quotes Plutarch as saying that one should not chop wood with a key, or open the door with an axe. He who should do so would not only be spoiling both those utensils, but would also be depriving himself of the utility of both. He believed that this applied to the arts.

The number of philosophers and writers who have attempted empirical classifications of the arts is enormous: it ranges in comparatively recent times from Lessing, by way of Schasler, Solger, and Hartmann, to Richard Wagner, whose theory of the combination of the arts was first mooted in the eighteenth century.

Lotze, while reflecting upon the futility of these attempts, himself adopts a method, which he says is the most "convenient," and thereby incurs the censure of Schasler. This method is in fact suitable for his studies in botany and in zoology, but useless for the philosophy of the spirit. Thus both these thinkers maintained Lessing's wrong principle as to the constancy, the limits, and the peculiar nature of each art.

Who among aestheticians has criticized this principle? Aristotle had a glimpse of the truth, when he refused to admit that the distinction between prose and poetry lay in an external fact, the metre. Schleiermacher seems to have been the only one who was thoroughly aware of the difficulty of the problem. In analysis, indeed, he goes so far as to say that what the arts have in common is not the external fact, which is an element of diversity; and connecting such an observation as this with his clear distinction between art and what is called technique, we might argue that Schleiermacher looked upon the divisions between the arts as non-existent. But he does not make this logical inference, and his thought upon the problem continues to be wavering and undecided. Nebulous, uncertain, and contradictory as is this portion of Schleiermacher's theory, he has yet the great merit of having doubted Lessing's theory, and of having asked himself by what right are special arts held to be distinct in art.

Schleiermacher _absolutely denied the existence of a beautiful in nature_, and praised Hegel for having sustained this negation. Hegel did not really deserve this praise, as his negation was rather verbal than effective; but the importance of this thesis as stated by Schleiermacher is very great, in so far as he denied the existence of an objective natural beauty not produced by the spirit of man. This theory of the beautiful in nature, when taken in a metaphysical sense, does not constitute an error peculiar to aesthetic science. It forms part of a fallacious general theory, which can be criticized together with its metaphysic.

The theory of aesthetic senses, that is, of certain superior senses, such as sight and hearing, being the only ones for which aesthetic impressions exist, was debated as early as Plato. The _Hippias major_ contains a discussion upon this theme, which Socrates leads to the conclusion that there exist beautiful things, which do not reach us through impressions of eye or ear. But further than this, there exist things which please the eye, but not the ear, and _vice versa_; therefore the reason of beauty cannot be visibility or audibility, but something different from, yet common to both. Perhaps this question has never been so acutely and so seriously dealt with as in this Platonic dialogue. Home, Herder, Hegel, Diderot, Rousseau, Berkeley, all dealt with the problem, but in a more or less arbitrary manner. Herder, for instance, includes touch with the higher aesthetic senses, but Hegel removes it, as having immediate contact with matter as such, and with its immediate sensible qualities.

Schleiermacher, with his wonted penetration, saw that the problem was not to be solved so easily. He refuted the distinction between clear and confused senses. He held that the superiority of sight and hearing over the other senses lay in their free activity, in their capacity of an activity proceeding from within, and able to create forms and sounds without receiving external impressions. The eye and the ear are not merely means of perception, for in that case there could be no visual and no auditive arts. They are also functions of voluntary movements, which fill the domain of the senses. Schleiermacher, however, considered that the difference was rather one of quantity, and that we should allow to the other senses a minimum of independence.

The sensualists, as we know, maintain that all the senses are aesthetic. That is the hedonistic hypothesis, which has been dealt with and disproved in this book. We have shown the embarrassment in which the hedonists find themselves, when they have dubbed all the senses "aesthetic," or have been obliged to differentiate in an absurd manner some of the senses from the others. The only way out of the difficulty lies in abandoning the attempt to unite orders of facts so diverse as the representative form of the spirit and the conception of given physical organs or of a given material of impressions.

The origin of classes of speech and of grammatical forms is to be found in antiquity, and as regards the latter, the disputes among the Alexandrian philosophers, the analogists, and the anomalists, resulted in logic being identified with grammar. Anything which did not seem logical was excluded from grammar as a deviation. The analogists, however, did not have it all their own way, and grammar in the modern sense of the word is a compromise between these extreme views, that is, it contains something of the thought of Chrysippus, who composed a treatise to show that the same thing can be expressed with different sounds, and of Apollonius Discolus, who attempted to explain what the rigorous analogists refused to admit into their schemes and classifications. It is only of late years that we have begun to emerge from the superstitious reverence for grammar, inherited from the Middle Age. Such writers as Pott, in his introduction to Humboldt, and Paul in his _Principien d. Sprachgeschichte_, have done good service in throwing doubt upon the absolute validity of the parts of speech. If the old superstitions still survive tenaciously, we must attribute this partly to empirical and poetical grammar, partly to the venerable antiquity of grammar itself, which has led the world to forget its illegitimate and turbid origin.

The theory of the relativity of taste is likewise ancient, and it would be interesting to know whether the saying "there's no accounting for tastes" could be traced to a merely gustatory origin. In this sense, the saying would be quite correct, as it is _quite wrong_ when applied to aesthetic facts. The eighteenth century writers exhibit a piteous perplexity of thought on this subject. Home, for instance, after much debate, decides upon a common "standard of taste," which he deduces from the necessity of social life and from what he calls "a final cause." Of course it will not be an easy matter to fix this "standard of taste." As regards moral conduct, we do not seek our models among savages, so with regard to taste, we must have recourse to those few whose taste has not been corrupted nor spoilt by pleasure, who have received good taste from nature, and have perfected it by education and by the practice of life. If after this has been done, there should yet arise disputes, it will be necessary to refer to the principles of criticism, as laid down in his book by the said Home.

We find similar contradictions and vicious circles in the _Discourse on Taste_ of David Hume. We search his writings in vain for the distinctive characteristics of the man of taste, whose judgments should be final. Although he asserts that the general principles of taste are universal in human nature, and admits that no notice should be accorded to perversions and ignorance, yet there exist diversities of taste that are irreconcilable, insuperable, and blameless.

But the criticism of the sensualist and relativist positions cannot be made from the point of view of those who proclaim the absolute nature of taste and yet place it among the intellectual concepts. It has been shown to be impossible to escape from sensualism and relativity save by falling into the intellectualist error. Muratori in the eighteenth century is an instance of this. He was one of the first to maintain the existence of a rule of taste and of universal beauty. André also spoke of what appears beautiful in a work of art as being not that which pleases at once, owing to certain particular dispositions of the faculties of the soul and of the organs of the body, but that which has the right of pleasing the reason and reflection through its own excellence. Voltaire admitted an "universal taste," which was "intellectual," as did many others. Kant appeared, and condemned alike the intellectualist and the sensualistic error; but placing the beautiful in a symbol of morality, he failed to discover the imaginative absoluteness of taste. Later speculative philosophy did not attach importance to the question.

The correct solution was slow in making its way. It lies, as we know, in the fact that to judge a work of art we must place ourselves in the position of the artist at the time of production, and that to judge is to reproduce. Alexander Pope, in his _Essay on Criticism_, was among the first to state this truth:

A perfect judge will read each work of wit
With the same spirit that its author writ.

Remarks equally luminous were made by Antonio Conti, Terrasson, and Heydenreich in the eighteenth century, the latter with considerable philosophical development. De Sanctis gave in his adhesion to this formula, but a true theory of aesthetic criticism had not yet been given, because for such was necessary, not only an exact conception of nature in art, but also of the relations between the aesthetic fact and its historical conditions. In more recent times has been denied the possibility of aesthetic criticism; it has been looked upon as merely individual and capricious, and historical criticism has been set up in its place. This would be better called a criticism of extrinsic erudition and of bad philosophical inspiration--positivist and materialist. The true history of literature will always require the reconstruction and then the judgment of the work of art. Those who have wished to react against such emasculated erudition have often thrown themselves into the opposite extreme, that is, into a dogmatic, abstract, intellectualistic, or moralistic form of criticism.

This mention of the history of certain doctrines relating to Aesthetic suffices to show the range of error possible in the theory. Aesthetic has need to be surrounded by a vigilant and vigorous critical literature which shall derive from it and be at once its safeguard and its source of strength.