Chapter 23

C. Fiedler, published in German (in 1887) an extremely luminous work on the origin of artistic activity. He describes eloquently how the passive spectator seems to himself to grasp all reality, as the shows of life pass before him; but at the moment that he tries to realize this artistically, all disappears, and leaves him with the emptiness of his own thoughts. Yet by concentration alone do we attain to expression; art is a language that we gradually learn to speak. Artistic activity is only to be attained by limiting ourselves; it must consist of "forms precisely determined, tangible, sensibly demonstrable, precisely because it is spiritual." Art does not imitate nature, for what is nature, but that vast confusion of perceptions and representations that were referred to above? Yet in a sense art does imitate nature; it uses nature to produce values of a kind peculiar to itself. Those values are true visibility.

Fiedler's views correspond with those of his predecessor, Hanslick, but are more rigorously and philosophically developed. The sculptor A. Hildebrand may be mentioned with these, as having drawn attention to the nature of art as architectonic rather than imitative, with special application to the art of sculpture.

What we miss with these and with other specialists, is a broad view of art and language, as one and the same thing, the inheritance of all humanity, not of a few persons, specially endowed. H. Bergson in his book on laughter (1900) falls under the same criticism. He develops his theory of art in a manner analogous to Fiedler, and errs like him in looking upon it as something different and exceptional in respect to the language of every moment. He declares that in life the individuality of things escapes us: we see only as much as suffices for our practical ends. The influence of language aids this rude simplification: all but proper names are abstractions. Artists arise from time to time, who recover the riches hidden beneath the labels of ordinary life.

Amid the ruin of idealist metaphysics, is to be desired a healthy return to the doctrine of Baumgarten, corrected and enriched with the discoveries that have been made since his time, especially by romanticism and psychology. C. Hermann (1876) announced this return, but his book is a hopeless mixture of empirical precepts and of metaphysical beliefs regarding Logic and Aesthetic, both of which, he believes, deal not with the empirical thought and experience of the soul, but with the pure and absolute.

B. Bosanquet (1892) gives the following definition of the beautiful, as "that which has a characteristic or individual expressivity for the sensible perception, or for the imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressivity for the same means." The problem as posed by this writer by the antithesis of the two German schools of form and content, appears to us insoluble.

Though De Sanctis left no school in Italy, his teaching has been cleared of the obscurities that had gathered round it during the last ten years; and the thesis of the true nature of history, and of its nature, altogether different from natural science, has been also dealt with in Germany, although its precise relation to the aesthetic problem has not been made clear. Such labours and such discussions constitute a more favourable ground for the scientific development of Aesthetic than the stars of mystical metaphysic or the stables of positivism and of sensualism.

We have now reached the end of the inquiry into the history of aesthetic speculation, and we are struck with the smallness of the number of those who have seen clearly the nature of the problem. No doubt, amid the crowd of artists, critics, and writers on other subjects, many have incidentally made very just remarks, and if all these were added to the few philosophers, they would form a gallant company. But if, as Schiller truly observed, the rhythm of philosophy consist in a withdrawal from public opinion, in order to return to it with renewed vigour, it is evident that this withdrawal is essential, and indeed that in it lies the whole progress of philosophy.

During our long journey, we have witnessed grave aberrations from the truth, which were at the same time attempts to reach it; such were the hedonism of the sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity, of the sensualists of the eighteenth and second half of the nineteenth centuries; the moralistic hedonism of Aristophanes and the Stoics, of the Roman eclectics, of the writers of the Middle Age and of the Renaissance; the ascetic and logical hedonism of Plato and the Fathers of the Church; the aesthetic mysticism of Plotinus, reborn to its greatest triumphs, during the classic period of German thought.

Through the midst of these variously erroneous theories, that traverse the field of thought in all directions, runs a tiny rivulet of golden truth. Starting from the subtle empiricism of Aristotle, it flows in the profound penetration of Vico to the nineteenth century, where it appears again in the masterly analyses of Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and De Sanctis.

This brief list shows that the science of Aesthetic is no longer to be discovered, but it also shows _that it is only at its beginning_.

The birth of a science is like the birth of a human being. In order to live, a science, like a man, has to withstand a thousand attacks of all sorts. These appear in the form of errors, which must be extirpated, if the science is not to perish. And when one set has been weeded, another crops up; when these have been dealt with, the former errors often return. Therefore _scientific criticism_ is always necessary. No science can repose on its laurels, complete, unchallenged. Like a human being, it must maintain its position by constant efforts, constant victories over error. The general errors which reveal a negation of the very concept of art have already been dealt with in the Historical Summary. The particular errors have been exposed in the Theory. They may be divided under three heads: (i.) Errors as to the characteristic quality of the aesthetic fact, or (ii.) as to its specific quality, or (iii.) as to its generic quality. These are contradictions of the characteristics of intuition, of theoretic contemplation, and of spiritual activity, which constitute the aesthetic fact.

The principal bar to a proper understanding of the true nature of language has been and still is Rhetoric, with the modern form it has assumed, as style. The rhetorical categories are still mentioned in treatises and often referred to, as having definite existence among the parts of speech. Side by side with such phrases goes that of the double form, or metaphor, which implies that there are two ways of saying the same thing, the one simple, the other ornate.

Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and many minor personages, have been shown to be victims of the rhetorical categories, and in our own day we have writers in Italy and in Germany who devote much attention to them, such as R. Bonghi and G. Gröber; the latter employs a phraseology which he borrows from the modern schools of psychology, but this does not alter the true nature of his argument. De Sanctis gave perhaps the clearest and most stimulating advice in his lectures on Rhetoric, which he termed Anti-rhetoric.

But even he failed to systematize his thought, and we may say that the true critique of Rhetoric can only be made from the point of view of the aesthetic activity, which is, as we know, _one_, and therefore does not give rise to divisions, and _cannot express the same content now in one form, now in another_. Thus only can we drive away the double monster of naked form deprived of imagination, and of decorated form, which would represent something more than imagination. The same remarks apply to artistic and literary styles, and to their various laws or rules. In modern times they have generally been comprised with rhetoric, and although now discredited, they cannot be said to have altogether disappeared.

J.C. Scaliger may be entitled the protagonist of the unities in comparatively modern times: he it was who "laid the foundations of the classical Bastille," and supplied tyrants of literature, like Boileau, with some of their best weapons. Lessing opposed the French rules and restrictions with German rules and restrictions, giving as his opinion that Corneille and others had wrongly interpreted Aristotle, whose rules did not really prevent Shakespeare from being included among correct writers! Lessing undoubtedly believed in intellectual rules for poetry. Aristotle was the tyrant, father of tyrants, and we find Corneille saying "qu'il est aisé de s'accommoder avec Aristote," much in the same way as Tartuffe makes his "accommodements avec le ciel." In the next century, several additions were made to the admitted styles, as for instance the "tragédie bourgeoise."

But these battles of the rules with one another are less interesting than the rebellion against all the rules, which began with Pietro Aretino in the sixteenth century, who makes mock of them in the prologues to his comedies. Giordano Bruno took sides against the makers of rules, saying that the rules came from the poetry, and "therefore there are as many genuses and species of true rules as there are genuses and species of true poets." When asked how the true poets are to be known, he replies, "by repeating their verses, which either cause delight, or profit, or both." Guarini, too, said that "the world judges poetry, and its sentence is without appeal."

Strangely enough, it was priest-ridden Spain that all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led the van of revolt against the rules and precepts of the grammarians. While Torquato Tasso remained the miserable slave of grammarians unworthy to lick the dust from his feet, Lope de Vega slyly remarked that when he wrote his comedies, he locked up the givers of precepts with six keys, that they might not reproach him. J.B. Marino declared that he knew the rules better than all the pedants in the world; "but the true rule is to know when to break the rules, in accordance with the manners of the day and the taste of the age." Among the most acute writers of the end of the seventeenth century is to be mentioned Gravina, who well understood that a work of art must be its own criterion, and said so clearly when praising a contemporary for a work which did not enter any one of the admitted categories. Unfortunately Gravina did not clearly formulate his views.

France of the eighteenth century produced several writers like Du Bos, who declared that men will always prefer the poems that move them, to those composed according to rule. La Motte combated the unities of place and time, and Batteux showed himself liberal in respect to rules. Voltaire, although he opposed La Motte and described the three unities as the three great laws of good sense, was also capable of declaring that all styles but the tiresome are good, and that the best style is that which is best used. In England we find Home in his _Elements of Criticism_ deriding the critics for asserting that there must be a precise criterion for distinguishing epic poetry from all other forms of composition. Literary compositions, he held, melt into one another, just like colours.

The literary movement of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries attacked rules of all sorts. We will not dwell upon the many encounters of these periods, nor record the names of those that conquered gloriously, or their excesses. In France the preface to the _Cromwell_ of V. Hugo (1827), in Italy the _Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo_, were clarions of rebellion. The principle first laid down by A.W. Schlegel, that the form of compositions must be organic and not mechanic, resulting from the nature of the subject, from its internal development not from an external stamp, was enunciated in Italy. Art is always a whole, a synthesis.

But it would be altogether wrong to believe that this empirical defeat of the styles and rules implied their final defeat in philosophy. Even writers who were capable of dispensing with prejudice when judging works of art, once they spoke as philosophers, were apt to reassume their belief in those categories which, empirically, they had discarded. The spectacle of these literary or rhetorical categories, raised by German philosophers to the honours of philosophical deduction, is even more amusing than that which afforded amusement to Home. The truth is that they were unable to free their aesthetic systems of intellectualism, although they proclaimed the empire of the mystic idea. Schelling (1803) at the beginning, Hartmann (1890) at the end of the century, furnish a good example of this head and tail.

Schelling, in his Philosophy of Art, declares that, historically speaking, the first place in the styles of poetry is due to Epic, but, scientifically speaking, it falls to Lyric. In truth, if poetry be the representation of the infinite in the finite, then lyric poetry, in which prevails the finite, must be its first moment. Lyric poetry corresponds to the first of the ideal series, to reflection, to knowledge; epic poetry corresponds to the second power, to action. This philosopher finally proceeds to the unification of epic and lyric poetry, and from their union he deduces the dramatic form, which is in his view "the supreme incarnation of the essence and of the _in-se_ of every art."

With Hartmann, poetry is divided into poetry of declamation and poetry for reading. The first is subdivided into Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic; the Epic is divided into plastic epic, proper epic, pictorial epic, and lyrical epic; Lyric is divided into epical lyric, lyrical lyric, and dramatic lyric; Dramatic is divided into lyrical dramatic, epical dramatic, and dramatical dramatic. The second (readable poetry) is divided into poetry which is chiefly epical, lyrical, and dramatic, with the tertiary division of moving, comic, tragic, and humoristic; and poetry which can all be read at once, like a short story, or that requires several sittings, like a romance.

These brief extracts show of what dialectic pirouettes and sublime trivialities even philosophers are capable, when they begin to treat of the Aesthetic of the tragic, comic, and humorous. Such false distinctions are still taught in the schools of France and Germany, and we find a French critic like Ferdinand Brunetière devoting a whole volume to the evolution of literary styles or classes, which he really believes to constitute literary history. This prejudice, less frankly stated, still infests many histories of literature, even in Italy.

We believe that the falsity of these rules of classes should be scientifically demonstrated. In our Theory of Aesthetic we have shown how we believe that it should be demonstrated.

The proof of the theory of the limits of the arts has been credited to Lessing, but his merit should rather be limited to having been the first to draw attention to the problem. His solution was false, but his achievement nevertheless great, in having posed the question clearly. No one before him, in antiquity, in the Middle Age, or in modern times, had seriously asked: What is the value of the distinctions between the arts? Which of them comes first? Which second? Leonardo da Vinci had declared his personal predilection for painting, Michael Angelo for sculpture, but the question had not been philosophically treated before Lessing.

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.