Chapter VII

_An esthetic theory framed to suit the view of life of the
ruling classes._

From the time that people of the upper classes lost faith in Church-Christianity, beauty (that is to say, the pleasure received from art) became their standard of good and bad art. And in accordance with that view, an esthetic theory naturally sprang up among those upper classes, justifying such a conception--a theory according to which the aim of art is to exhibit beauty. The partisans of this esthetic theory in confirmation of its truth affirmed that it was no invention of their own, but that it existed in the nature of things and was recognised even by the ancient Greeks. But this assertion was quite arbitrary and had no foundation other than the fact that among the ancient Greeks, in consequence of the low level of their moral ideal (as compared with the Christian), their conception of the good, τὸ ἀγαθόν, was not yet sharply divided from their conception of the beautiful, τὸ καλόν.

That highest perfection of goodness (not only not identical with beauty but for the most part contrasting with it) which was discerned by the Jews even in the times of Isaiah and fully expressed by Christianity, was quite unknown to the Greeks. They supposed that the beautiful must necessarily also be the good. It is true that their foremost thinkers--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle--felt that goodness may happen not to coincide with beauty. Socrates expressly subordinated beauty to goodness; Plato, to unite the two conceptions, spoke of spiritual beauty; while Aristotle demanded from art that it should have a moral influence on people (κάθαρσις). But notwithstanding all this, they could not quite dismiss the notion that beauty and goodness coincide.

Consequently, in the language of that period, a compound word (καλοκἀγαθία, beauty-goodness) came into use to express that notion.

Evidently the Greek sages began to draw near to that perception of goodness which is expressed in Buddhism and in Christianity, but got entangled in defining the relation between goodness and beauty. Plato’s reasoning about beauty and goodness is full of contradictions. And it was just this confusion of ideas that those Europeans of a later age, who had lost all faith, tried to elevate into a law. They tried to prove that this union of beauty and goodness is inherent in the very essence of things; that beauty and goodness must coincide; and that the word and conception καλοκἀγαθία (which had a meaning for Greeks but has none at all for Christians) represents the highest ideal of humanity. On this misunderstanding the new science of esthetics was built up: and to justify its existence the teachings of the ancients on art were twisted so that it should appear that this invented science of esthetics had existed among the Greeks.

In reality the reasoning of the ancients on art was quite unlike ours. As Benard, in his book on the esthetics of Aristotle, quite justly remarks: _Pour qui veut y regarder de près, la théorie du beau et celle de l’art sont tout à fait séparées dans Aristote, comme elles le sont dans Platon et chez tous leurs successeurs_ (_L’esthétique d’Aristote et de ses successeurs_, Paris, 1889, p. 28).[91] And, indeed, the reasoning of the ancients on art not only does not confirm our science of esthetics, but rather contradicts its doctrine of beauty. But nevertheless all the esthetic guides, from Schasler to Knight, declare that the science of the beautiful--esthetic science--was begun by the ancients, by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; and was continued, they say, to some extent by the Epicureans and Stoics, by Seneca and Plutarch, down to Plotinus. But it is supposed that this science, by some unfortunate accident, suddenly vanished in the fourth century and stayed away for about 1500 years, and only after these 1500 years had passed did it revive in Germany, A. D. 1750, in Baumgarten’s doctrine.

After Plotinus, says Schasler, fifteen centuries passed away during which there was not the slightest scientific interest shewn for the world of beauty and art. These one and a half thousand years, says he, have been lost to esthetics and have contributed nothing towards the erection of the learned edifice of this science.[92]

In reality nothing of the kind happened. The science of esthetics, the science of the beautiful, neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. Simply the Greeks (just like everybody else, always and everywhere) considered art (like everything else) good only when it served goodness (as they understood goodness), and bad when it was in opposition to that goodness. And the Greeks themselves were so little developed morally that goodness and beauty seemed to them to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life was erected the science of esthetics, invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten’s theory. The Greeks (as anyone may see who will read Benard’s admirable book on Aristotle and his successors, and Walter’s work on Plato) never had a science of esthetics.

Esthetic theories arose about one hundred and fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world, and arose simultaneously among different nations,--German, Italian, Dutch, French, and English. The founder and organiser of it, who gave it a scientific and theoretic form, was Baumgarten.

With a characteristically German external exactitude, pedantry, and symmetry, he devised and expounded this extraordinary theory. And notwithstanding its obvious lack of substance, no one else’s theory so pleased the cultured crowd or was accepted so readily and with such an absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the upper classes that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it is repeated by learned and unlearned as though it were something indubitable and self-evident.

_Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli_,[93] and so, or even more so, theories _habent sua fata_ according to the condition of error in which that society lives among whom and for whom the theories are invented. If a theory justifies the false position in which a certain part of a society is living, then however unfounded or even obviously false the theory may be, it is accepted and becomes an article of faith to that section of society. Such, for instance, was the celebrated and unfounded theory expounded by Malthus, of the tendency of the population of the world to increase in geometrical progression but of the means of subsistence to increase only in arithmetical progression, and of the consequent over-population of the world; such also was the theory (an outgrowth of the Malthusian) of selection and struggle for existence as the basis of human progress. Such again is Marx’s theory, which regards the gradual destruction of small private production by large capitalistic production, now going on around us, as an inevitable decree of fate. However unfounded such theories are, however contrary to all that is known and confessed by humanity, and however obviously immoral they may be, they are credulously accepted, pass uncriticised, and are preached, perhaps for centuries, until the conditions are destroyed which they served to justify, or until their absurdity has become too evident. To this class belongs this astonishing theory of the Baumgartenian Trinity: Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, according to which it appears that the very best that can be done by the art of nations after 1900 years of Christian teaching is to choose as the ideal of their life the ideal that was held by a small, semi-savage, slave-holding people who lived 2000 years ago, who imitated the nude human body extremely well and erected buildings pleasant to look at. All these incompatibilities pass completely unnoticed. Learned people write long, cloudy treatises on beauty as a member of the esthetic trinity of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; _das Schöne_, _das Wahre_, _das Gute_; _le Beau_, _le Vrai_, _le Bon_, are repeated with capital letters by philosophers, estheticians, and artists, by private individuals, by novelists and by _feuilletonistes_; and they all think when pronouncing these sacrosanct words that they speak of something quite definite and solid--something on which they can base their opinions. In reality these words not only have no definite meaning, but they hinder us in attaching any definite meaning to existing art; they are wanted only for the purpose of justifying the false importance we attribute to an art that transmits every kind of feeling if only those feelings afford us pleasure.[94]