HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC A HISTORY OF yFSTHETIC BY BERNARD BOSANQUET M.A. (Oxon.) Hon. LL.O. (Glasgow) formerly Jellow of Universiyr College, Oxford LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD NEW YORK : HUMANITIES PRESS INC FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1892 SECOND EDITION I9O4 REPRINTED 1910, 1917, 1922, 1934, I949> 1956, 1966 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY UNWIN BROTHERS LTD WOKING AND LONDON PREFACE ^Esthetic theory is a branch of philosophy, and exists for the sake of knowledge and not as a guide to practice. The present work is, therefore, primarily addressed to those who may find a philosophical interest in understanding the place and value of beauty in the system of human life, as conceived by leading thinkers in different periods of the world’s history. It is important to insist that the aesthetic philosopher does not commit the impertinence of invading the artist’s domain with an apparatus belli of critical principles and precepts. The opinion that this is so draws upon sbothetic much obloquy, which would be fully deserved if the opinion were true. Art, we are told, is useless ; in a kindred sense aesthetic may well submit to be useless also. The aesthetic theorist, in short, desires to understand the artist, not in order to interfere with the latter, but in order to satisfy an intellectual interest of his own. But besides professed students of philosophy, there is a large and increasing public of readers who are genuinely attracted by a fairly clear and connected exposition oT any p‘hilbsophical science the subject- matter of which comes home to them, be it Logic or Ethic, Sociology, or the theory of Religion. Such readers are approaching philosophy through the subject-matter that already interests them, instead of approaching the particular subject-matter simply because it is an integral part of philosophy. I confess to cherishing a hope that in spite of the defects which deprive this book of the charm that a more skilful writer might have given to such a subject, many intelligent lovers of beauty will be glad to make acquaintance, through it, with the thoughts of great men upon this important element of the spiritual world. I have regarded my task, however, as the history of aesthetic, and not as the history of aestheticians. I have not paid much attention to the claims of historical justice. While I feel sure that no writer of the first rank is omitted, I could not venture to say that all the Is X PREFACE. writers included are more important than any that are excluded. I have thought first of the arrangement necessary or convenient in order to exhibit the affiliation of ideas, and their completest forms, and only in the second place of the individual rank and merit of the writers to be dealt with. Moreover, as the first chapter will show, I have not been able to persuade myself to treat my subject as a mere account of speculative theory. No branch of the history of philosophy can be adequately treated in this way, and the history of aesthetic least of alL My aim has therefore been to exhibit philosophic opinion as only the clear and crystallized form of the aesthetic consciousness or sense of beauty, which is itself determined by conditions that lie deep in the life of successive ages. I have desired, in fact, so far as possible, to write the history of the aesthetic consciousness. Many readers may complain of the almost total absence of direct reference to Oriental art, whether in the ancient world or in modern China and Japan. For this omission there were several connected reasons. I was hardly called upon, even if I had been competent for the task, to deal with an aesthetic consciousness which had not, to my knowledge, reached the point of being clarified into speculative theory. It was, moreover, necessary to limit my subject in some definite way; and it seemed natural to exclude everything that did not bear on the continuous development of the European art-con- sciousness. In so far as contact with Oriental art influenced the early Greek, and again the Byzantine development, a reference to it is im- plied in Hegel's and Morris* treatment of those periods. And finally, this omission is not without a positive ground, though here I really touch on a matter which is beyond my competence. The separation from the life of the progressive races, and the absence of a reflective theory of beauty, must surely have a fundamental connection with the non-architectural character pointed out by Mr. Morris in the art of China and Japan (p. 456). Without denying its beauty, therefore, I regarded it as something apart, and not well capable of being bi ought into the same connected story with the European feeling for the beautiful. A study of such art from a competent hand, in the light of aesthetic theory, would be a welcome aid to modern speculation. With reference to my use of authorities, while there is often more egotism than modesty in calling the public to witness the course of an author’s reading, I feel absolutely bound in this case to warn my readers that the reliability of the different parts of my work is unequal. For the mediaeval period between Plotinus and Dante, and in a lesser PREFACE. xi degree for the Hellenistic period between Aristotle and Plotinus, my knowledge is not, for the most part, at first hand, and represents a voyage of discovery rather than a journey on ground familiar to me. I have not for these periods been able to follow the scholar’s golden rule — never to quote from a book that he has^ not read from cover to cover. I have drawn my quotations from works of reference, and though I have, as a rule, carefully verified them and endeavoured to judge of the context, my estimate of the writer’s position usually rests on the authority, in many cases Erdmann’s History of Philosophy and the articles in the Encyclopcedia Britannica, which I have consulted for information. In the case of Thomas Aquinas in particular, I pro- fess no original knowledge at all. The very full quotations most courteously furnished me by Dr. Gildea appeared too significant to be left unused, and his authority warranted me in supposing that in these passages the principal materials for forming a judgment were before me. I do not desire it to be understood that he agrees with me in the estimate which I have formed of St. Thomas’s aesthetic views. It would have been foolish, I thought, to omit the more obvious points of the mediaeval development, both in art and in opinion, the mere mention of which might be suggestive to my readers, simply because I had to take them from such writers as Prof. Adamson, Prof. Seth, Prof. Middleton, Mr. Morris and Mr. Pater, and not from original research. Some division of labour must be allowed, though the fact that it has been resorted to should always be made known. Acknowledgments for assistance are due from me above all to Prof. A. C. Bradley, who not only furnished me with a list of books which has been of the utmost service, but lent me out of his own library many of those works, which I might otherwise have had a difficulty in procuring. I also owe the most cordial thanks to Mr. J. D. Rogers, for permitting me to embody in an Appendix his analyses of some instances of musical expression — models, as I think, of what such analyses should be — and to Dr. Gildea, for the information mentioned above. And, finally, it is only right to say, that it is on the Council of the Home Arts and Industries Associa- tion, and in contact with its workers, that I have learned to appre- ciate, as I hope, with some degree of justice the writings of Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Morris, which may easily remain a sealed book to those who have not observed in simple cases the relation of work- manship to life. Many readers, who are familiar with the average xii PREFACE. work of the classes of that Association, may think that it reveals no great mystery of beauty ; but I am convinced that the leaders of the Association have sound insight, and that experience, to an in- creasing extent, is justifying their principles. London, April, 1892. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION My chief duty in preparing a second edition of this work has been to remove so far as possible, by corrections in the form of notes, the defects which arose from its being published previously to Professor Butcher's Treatise on Aristotle's Iheory of Poetry and Fine Art, I have made no pretence of re-writing, as it was impossible for me seriously to attempt the task. I have therefore let the text stand, except in case of obvious misprints, and have admitted errors or made observations on criticisms in notes appended to the chapters which they concern. These notes are indicated by letters of the alphabet, and will, I hope, be readily distinguished from the footnotes indicated by numbers. On meeting with a reference “ al' the reader has only to turn to the last page of the chapter before him, where he will find the note referred to. I do not think that my general view of the relation between ancient and modern ^Esthetic is seriously modified by Professor Butcher's treatment of Aristotle, while my aesthetic theory on the whole is corroborated by it. As a worshipper of the Greeks, I am only too glad to follow him towards ascribing on the whole a deeper suggestiveness to their views than I had previously permitted myself to find there. In my anxiety not to go too far, I may hardly have gone far enough. At any rate, I wish to say that my references to his work cannot possibly discharge a reader who cares for the subject from the duty and pleasure of studying it for himself. I have not attempted to modify my interpretation of Aristotle's definition of Tragedy, which is simply that of Bernays. Professor Butcher has developed a modification of this view, which the student should learn from Professor Butcher's work. I hope that the fact of a second edition of a work like this being called for may indicate that with all its defects it has a point of view which is felt to be valuable. And I hope that this point of view may soon come to be more effectively presented by more capable critics and more attractive writers than the author. St. Andrews, March 1904. ziii CONTENTS Preface . . ^ . i . ix CHAPTER I. PAGE Proposed treatment, and its connection with the definition OF Beauty. 1. The History of ^Esthetic, and the History of Fine Art i 2. The relation of Natural Beauty to the Beauty of Fine Art 3 3. The definition of Beauty, and its relation to the History of ^Esthetic 4 CHAPTER II. The creation of a poetic world, and its first encounter with REFLECTION. 1. E^rly Reflection hostile to Art 10 2. Creation of the World of Beauty .10 3. Reason for the Attitude of Reflection 1 1 4. Neglected Suggestion in the Idea of Imitation . . 12 5. Wide use of term “ Imitation ” in Ancient Philosophy 13 6. Further Explanation how Greek Art could be called “ Imitative " 13 i. Facility of Imitative Art makes it Ideal 13 ii. Hellenic Art not so Abstractly Ideal as has been thought 13 7. The Ground prepared for ^Esthetic Theory • . -15 CHAPTER III. The fundamental outlines of Greek theo]^ concerning the BEAUTIFUL. The Principles and their Connexion e6 1. The Moralistic Principle 17 a. How it shows itself 18 Its ^Esthetic Value a 1 XVI TABLE OF CONTENTS. FAGS a. The Metaphysical Principle . . . . .23 a. How it shows itself 23 j8. Its ^Esthetic Value .28 i. ^Esthetic Semblance .... 28 ii. Semblance inadequate to Reality ... 29 3. The ^Esthetic Principle .... 30 a. General statements in Ancient Writers *32 p. Particular cases 34 i. Colour and Tone . . ■ ■ • 34 ii. Elementary Geometrical Forms -35 iii. Simple Song-music .... 36 iv. Ethical and Logical Wholes -3^ V. The Lesser Arts and Formative Art ... 38 vi. Poetry and the Drama .... 39 4. Illustration from Fechner, and Conclusion .... 40 CHAPTER IV. Signs of progress in Greek theory concerning the beautiful. 1. The three Antitheses ... - 43 2. The Pre-Socratics .... ... 43 3. Socrates ..... 44 a. “ Can the Invisible be imitated ? ” 44 p. ^Esthetic and Real Interest ... * 45 4. Pythagoreanism ......... 46 a. Symbolism ......... 46 p. (omitted). y. Concrete Analysis 46 S- Plato 47 a. Symbolism 47 P. ^Esthetic Interest 50 y. Concrete Criticisms . -54 6. Aristotle . .... ■ • 55 a. Symbolism - 5 ^ i. Selection of Phenomena. . . 56 ii. The Ugly ... -57 iii. Poetry Philosophic ... . . 59 iv. Musical Symbolism ..... 60 V. Art corrective of Nature . . . . 61 p. iEsthetic Interest 62 i. Beauty, Virtue, and Pleasure 62 iL Educational Interest 63 TABLE OF CONTENTS. xvii PAGE iiL The Function of Tragedy .... 64 a. Materials from Aristotle .... 64 b. Estimate of his meaning .... 66 y. Concrete Criticism .... 68 i. History and Elements of Drama . .68 ii. Plot and character-drawing 70 CHAPTER V. Alexandrian and Greco-Roman culture to Constantine the Great. Character of the Period the reign OF 77 I. General Philosophy and Art 81 a. Philosophy 81 )8. Poetry 86 i. New and Latin Comedy 86 ii. The Idyll 87 iii. The Anthology 88 iv. Roman Poets 88 y. Formative Art and Architecture 93 2. Reflective ^Esthetic 99 i. Stoic .... 99 ii. Epicurean 100 iii. Aristarchus and Zoilus 102 iv. Later Greco-Roman Critics 102 V. Plotinus .... 1 1 1 a. Symbolism 113 .Esthetic Interest 114 y. Concrete Criticism . • • “5 CHAPTER VI. Some traces of the continuity of the jisthetic consciousness THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE AGES. Our Attitude to the Renaissance 1 20 I. Tendency to extend Renaissance back towajds Christian Era 120 i. Pre-Raphaelite Painting .121 ii. Thirteenth Century French Literature .122 iii. Abelard . ... 123 iv. Architecture and Decoration back to Sixth Century . 123 V. Christian Art and Song of the Earliest Centuries 126 Fi Necessity of an Interval of Austerity ... 130 A* xv\u TABLE or CONTENTS. PAGE 2 Intellectual Continuity of iEsthedc from Plotinus • xji i. From Emanation to Evolution ... 132 ii. Dualism and Love of Nature . *133 i’i. Augustine on ** Beauty of Universe ” • *33 iv. Suppression of Paganism and Increasing Austerity . .136 V. Significance of Iconoclasm ... • • *37 vi. The System of Scotus Erigena ... 139 vii. Anticipation of End of World in 1000 a.d. . . .143 viii. The Modern Mind in St. Francis . . .144 ix. The iEsthetic Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas • .146 CHAPTER VII. A comparison of Danie and Shakespeare in respect of some FORMAL characteristics. 1. Limits of the subject ... 151 2. The Selection of ArtiUic Form by the two Poets . . • 152 3. The Kind of Significance aimed at by each . . .156 4. The true Relations of the later Renaissance . . .162 CHAPTER VIII. The problem of modern iCSTHETic philosophy. 1. The Process of Preparation . . ,166 2. The Prolonged Interruption of ^Esthetic .166 3. Preparation of the Problem: Descartes to Baumgarten 170 i. The two Tendencies, “Universal ” and “ Individual ” 170 ii. Distinguished from Ancient Philosophy 171 hi. From each other *73 iv. Connexion with Mediaeval Dualism . • *74 V. ^Esthetic Ideas in pre-Kantian Phila^ophy . - *75 a, Leibnitz 177 Shaftesbury 177 c. Hume 178 d. Nature of the Advance . . . . .180 €, Baumgarten 182 TABLE OF CONTENTS. xix CHAPTER IX. FACE The data of modern iCSTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. Limits of the Subject i88 I. Classical Philology i88 i. Joseph Scaliger i88 ii. F. A. Wolff . . .189 9. Archaeology 190 i. Early Discoveries on Italian Soil 191 ii. Early Travels in Greece 192 iii. Herculaneum and Pompeii 192 iv. Greece proper 193 3. Art-criticism 197 i. Pierre Corneille 197 ii. Fontenelle and Voltaire 201 iii. The British Writers ...... 202 a. Burke and Lord Kaimes ..... 203 a. Burke^s Purgation Theory .... 203 A The Sublime akin to Ugliness . 203 r. Painful Reality not Disagreeable . 204 d. Anticipations of Later Ideas .... 205 Hogarth ........ 206 y. Reynolds ....... 209 iv. Germans before Lessing 210 a. Gottsched . . . .211 The “Swiss” . . .214 F. Lessing 216 a. His Conception of Criticism . .217 / 3 . Aim of the Laocoon .220 y. Demarcation of “Painting” and Poetry 223 8. Lessing’s Attitude towards the Problem of Ugliness 225 c. A point in which his Classicism was justified 229 {. His Theory of the Drama 230 vi. Winckelmann. His Characteristics • *39 a. Feeling for Art as Human Production . • 240 p. True sense of a History of Art . 242 y. Recognition of Phases in Beauty % ... 244 8. Conflict between Beauty and Expression .248 vii. Data not utilized by the Critics 251 viiL Indications of a Transition 252 TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER X. Kant — The problem brought to a focus. 1. His Relation to the Problem and the Data 2. Place of the ^Esthetic Problem in his System . 3. Why the ^Esthetic Judgment is the Answer to the Problem i. Demarcation of .Esthetic Consciousness ii. Positive Essence of Esthetic Consciousness iii. Its Subjectivity 4. Conflict of Abstract and Concrete in Kant*s Esthetic 5. Range and Subdivision of Esthetic Perception Theory of Sublime ...... ii. Classification of Arts 6 . Conclusion PAGE *55 256 261 265 265 266 267 274 275 279 280 CHAPTER XI. The first steps of a concrete synthesis — Schiller and Goethe. I. Schiller 286 1. Objectivity of Beauty . . . . 288 a. Esthetic Semblance . . .292 b. The Play-impulse .... 294 2. Opposition of “ Antique ” and “ Modern 296 3. Schlegel on Schiller ....... 300 4. Schiller on Schlegel . . . -301 II. Goethe . . 304 1. Gothic Architecture ....... 305 i. Attitude to the Renaissance Tradition . 306 ii. “ Gothic as a disparaging term .... 307 iii. Characteristic Art . ..... 309 2. Definitions of Hirt and Meyer -311 3. Goethe^s Analysis of the Excellent in Art . . w .312 4. Conclusion 316 CHAPTER XII. Objective id&alism — Schelling and Hegel. I. Schelling ... i. Objectivity of Art and Beauty . ii. Historical Treatment of “ Ancient and Modern ” iii. The Particular Arts . - . . . • 317 . 319 . • 322 • 327 TABLE OF CONTENTS. XXi FAOB IL i. Hegel — Dialectic in the Esthetic 334 ii. The Conception of Beauty .... 336 a. The Beauty of Nature .... 337 (1) Beauty of Abstract Form . 338 (2) Beauty in Unity of Sense-Material 339 p. Beauty of Art ; the Ideal . . 340 (1) Nature and the Ideal . 340 (2) The Ideal in Life and Action . 343 (3) Evolution of the Ideal .... 345 The Symbolic Art-form .... 346 Classical Art-form . 346 Romantic Art-form -347 (4) Classification of the Arts . 349 a. The Double Basis 349 p. Facts that Support the Double Basis 350 y. Principle of the Analytic Classification . 352 iy. Four Leading Conceptions Defined 355 (1) Ugliness -355 (2) The Sublime 356 (3) The Tragic 358 (4) The Comic 360 fv. Conclusion . 360 CHAPTER XIII. ‘ Exact ■ ^esthetic in Germany. 1. Need of Exact .Esthetic 363 2. Schopenhauer. ■ 363 i. Schopenhauer a kind of post-Kantian 363 ii. His account of the Beautiful, and its Modifications 365 iii. Criticism of Schopenhauer . 368 3. Herbart • 368 i. His Formalism and its Con.sequences .... 369 ii. His Division of .Esthetic Relations . -370 iii. Classification of the Arts . . *371 iv. Criticisrri and Estimate . . - 37 * 4. Zimmermann • 373 i. The Distinctive Work of Formal .Esthetic . *374 ii. Meaning of the “Together ” 376 iii. Elementary and Simple Forms . 377 iv. Psychological Meaning of the Theory, and its Value. 380 xxu TABLE OF CONTENTS. rAGE 5. Fechner 381 i. Criticism of Previous Inquiries 381 ii. Experiments with Rectangles, etc 382 iii. ^Esthetic Laws 384 6. Stumpf — Scope of his Analysis 387 7. Conclusion 388 i. How to judge of Formal Esthetic .... 388 ii. Lesson of its History .... 389 iii. Inclusion of Exact iEsthetic in Idealism . -391 CHAPTER XIV. The methodical completion of objective idealism. 1. Type of the later Objective Idealism .... 393 2. Transition to the later Objective Idealism . 394 a. Solger -394 p. Reference to Weisse and Vischer . 397 y. Rosenkranz 400 i. Ugliness as such . . 401 ii. Ugliness in art .... . 403 iii. The forms of opposition ...... 406 3. The later Objective Idealism 409 «. Carri^re ... 410 i. The Ugly 411 ii. Division of the Arts .411 iii. Attitude to the Renaissance 412 p. Schasler - 414 i. Conceptions indicated by the “ History” *414 ii. Ugliness, and Modifications of the Beautiful -4*7 iii. The Classification of the Arts 419 a. The Parallelism ,420 A The Mimic Dance 422 c. The Material ... 423 y. Hartmann .... 424 i. Significance of the History -425 ii. The Degrees of Beauty ; and Ugliness 429 a. The Orders of Formal Beauty -429 3 . Ugliness in Nature 429 €• Ugliness in Beauty ? ... 431 (1) No Ugliness in Beauty .... 432 (2) Real Ugliness 435 iii. The Division of the Arts 436 TABLE OF CONTENTS. XXili CHAPTER XV. PAOB Bboinninos or a theoretical reunion of contend ane expres- sion. 1. Philosophical Conditions of Recent English /Esthetic 441 9. General Influences of the Time . 442 a. Antiquities .... . 442 A Science . 444 €, Romantic Naturalism .... 445 d. The Democratic Spirit 446 ^ Synthesis of Content and Expression -447 i. The Characteristic 448 ii. The Life of the Workman 45 1 iii. The “ Lesser Arts ” . 454 iv. Penetrative Imagination and the Limits of Beauty . 458 V. Classification by Material, Applied to Poetry 460 4. Conclusion . . 462 i. Requirements of /Esthetic Science to-day . 463 h. The Future of Art .... 467 APPENDIX 1 . Hegel’s Abstract of his /Esthetic System 471 APPENDIX II. Some Analyses of Musical Expression, by Mr. J. D. Rogers . 488 Bibuooraphy .... . . 495 Index 499 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC CHAPTER I. PROPOSED TREATMENT, AND ITS CONNECTION WITH THE DEFINITION OF BEAUTY. It was not before the latter half of the eight- 5^ 0* eenth century that the term “ Esthetic ” was adopted with the meaning now recognised, in order to designate the philosophy of the beautiful as a dis- tinct province of theoretical inquiry. But the thing existed before the name ; for reflection upon beauty and upon fine art begins among Hellenic thinkers at least as early as the time of Socrates, if not, in a certain sense, with still earlier philosophers. If, then, “ .^^isthetic ” means the Philosophy of the Beautiful, the History of .Esthetic must mean the History of the Philo- .sophy of the Beautiful ; and it must accept as its immediate subject-matter the succession of systematic theories by which philosophers have attempted to explain or connect together the facts that relate to beauty. But this is not all. It is found necessary in a historical treatment even of logic or of general philosophy, to bring them into oontinaous relation with the concrete life that under- lies the formal conceptions which are being passed in review. The speculation of every age issues on the one hand from the formal teaching of the past, but on the other from the actual world as it urges itself upon consciousnessNn the present. As the history of logic or of general philosophy cannot be wholly dissociated from the history of science or of civilization, so the history of ethical or of aesthetic ideas is necessarily treated in some connection with the history of morals or of fine art. But within this analogy there is a notable distinction. 3 HISTORY OF iBSTHETlC. When we read, for example, the history of the Inductive Sciences in connection with the growth- of logical theory, we can take little interest in the bygone phases of particular branches of knowledge, except in as far as they help us to understand that development of the human mind which is at the moment the subject of our study. Antiquated chemistry or astronomy have for us an interest of curiosity no greater than that which a pile-dwelling or a dint hatchet has for the anthropological student. The same is true of many other elements of civilization, such as the details of political form or of social custom, the niceties of language, the minutiae of reli- gious dogmeL In aJl these aispects of life, although it is true that to have deciphered the past greatly aids us in under- standing the present, yet on the whole, excepting with a view to scientific research or historical realization, we are accus- tomed to let bygones be bygones. Moral and religious ideas, indeed, such ais have been all-powerful in a remote past, gener- ally retain a capacity of arousing our present interest ; so deep is the identity of man’s moral nature throughout all its mani- festations. But nothing is in this respect on a level with the greater creations of fine art, including noble literature. They alone have an importance which rather increases than dimi- nishes as the ages go by. And thus when we attempt the task of tracing the jesthetic consciousness through the stages of its development, we have before us a concrete material not of mere antiquarian interest, but constituting a large propor- tion of what is valued for its own sake in the surroundings of 'ur present life. The History of Fine Art is the history of the actual aesthetic consciousness, as a concrete phenomenon ; aesthetic theory is the philosophic analysis of this conscious- ness, for which the knowledge of its history is an essential condition. The history of aesthetic theory, again, is a narra- tive which traces the aesthetic consciousness in its intellectual form of aesthetic theory, but never forgets that the central matter to be elucidated is the value of beauty for human life, no less as implied in practice than as explicitly recogifised in reflection. In spite of the natural repugnance which may be felt against analytic intermeddling with the most beautiful things which we enjoy, it must be counted an advantage of this branch of the history of philosophy that it promises us not merely a theoretical interpretation of what is past and gone, but some aid at least in our appreciation of realities PROPOSED TREATMENT. 3 which appear to be the least perishable inheritance that the world possesses. 2. I have assumed in the last section that Fine ’Stm^Beau^ Art may be accepted, for theoretical purposes, as the chief, if not the sole representative of the world of beauty. It is necessary to explain the point of view from which this assumption appears justifiable. All beauty is in perception or imagination. When we dis- tinguish Nature from Art as a province of the beautiful, we do not mean to suggest that things have beauty independently of human perception, as for example in reactions upon one another such as those of gravitation or solidity. We must therefore be taken to include tacitly in our conception of natural beauty some normal or average capacity of aesthetic appreciation. But if so, it is plain that “ nature ” in this rela- tion differs from “art” principally in degree, both being in the medium of human perception or imagination, but the one consisting in the transient and ordinary presentation or idea of the average mind, the other in the fixed and heightened intuitions of the genius which can record and interpret. Now in studying any department of physical causation, we should not think it possible to restrict ourselves to consider- ing the so-called facts which daily meet the eye of the un- trained observer. It is from science that we must learn how to perceive ; and it is upon science that we rely, both in our own observations as far as we are qualified observers, and also in the organized and recorded perceptions of others, from which almost the whole of our natural knowledge is practi- cally derived. Nature in the sphere of aesthetic is analogous to the percep- tion of the ordinary observer in matters of physical science. In the first place, it is limited for each percipient to the range of his own eyes and ears as exercised on the external world, for it does not exist in the form of recorded or communicable contents ; and in the second place, it passes into the province of art, not by a sudden transition, but by*continuous modifica- tion, as the insight and power of enjoyment to which the beauty of Mature is relative are disciplined and intensified by aesthetic training and general culture. Therefore, just as in speaking generally of the real world we practically mean the world as known to science, so in speaking generally of the beautiful in the world we practically mean the beautiful as 4 HISTORY or ESTHETIC revealed by art. In both cases we rely upon the recorded perceptions of those who perceive best, both because they are the best perceptions and because they are recorded. This habit does not exclude the necessity of interpreting, appre- ciating, and, so far as may be, correcting the recorded perceptions by help of our own. Nor does the beauty of art, thus understood, exclude the beauty of nature. The fact that a completed “ work of art ” is a definite thing or action, which in some cases does not even represent any natural object, must indeed be duly considered, and the creative spirit must be recognised as a factor in artistic production. Nevertheless, it is a blunder to imagine that there is no art where there is no “ work of art,” or that whenever the painter is not at work on a picture he sees the same nature as we see and no more. For this reason it is justifiable in theory, as it is necessary in practice, to accept fine art as the main representative of the beautiful for the purpose of philosophical study. Even such an analysis of natural beauty in the light of physical fact as has been attempted by Ruskin in the Modern Painters is chiefly directed to showing how great artists have extended the boundaries of so-called natural beauty, by their superior insight into the expressive capabilities of natural scenes and objects. The standard by which the critic measures the achievement of the artist, when he says that he is measuring it by nature, is of course in the last resort his own artistic feeling and more or less trained perception. Nature for aesthetic theory means that province of beauty in which every man is his own artist. TbeDeflnition of 3* There is no definition of beauty that can be Beauty and said to have met with universal acceptance. It Its Relation to v ^ T ^ the History of appears, however, to be convenient that an ex- iEstbetic. planation should now be given of the sense in which the term will be employed in the present work. And if in such an explanation the fundamental theory of the ancients can be presented as the foundation for the most pregnant conception of the moderns, the resulting definition will at least lend itself readily to the purposes of a history of aesthetic. Among the ancients the fundamental theory of the beauti- ful was connected with the notions of rhythm, symmetry, harmony of parts ; in short, with the general formula of unity in variety. Among the moderns we find that more emphasis DEFINITION OF BEAUTY. 5 is laid on the idea of significance, expressiveness, the utter- ance of all that life contains ; in general, that is to say, on the conception of the characteristic. If these two elements are reduced to a common denomination, there suggests itself as a comprehensive definition of the beautiful, “ That which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense- perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium." The quality which is thus defined is of wider range than the predicate “beautiful” as commonly understood. It will be for the subsequent historical treatment to show that neither fine art nor average aesthetic perception can in the long run be confined within narrower limits than these. A few words may be added here by way of anticipatory ex- planation. The commonplace view is not wholly at fault which sees in the great art of the ancient Hellenes chiefly the qualities of harmony, regularity, and repose. Although the whole theory of modern aesthetic may well find application and support in the real variety and significance of Hellenic decoration, sculp- ture, and poetry, yet, as science begins with what is most obvious, it is not surprising that aesthetic reflection should have called attention in the first instance to their pervading harmony and regularity. Qualities of this type, because they symbolize, in a mode that appeals to sense-perception, the most abstract relations of systematic and orderly action or existence, may fairly be set down under the head of general or abstract expressiveness. The recognition of these relations as con- stituent elements of the beautiful was the main contribution of ancient philosophy to a;sthetic analysis. But when with the birth of the modern world the romantic sense of beauty was awakened, accompanied by the craving for free and passionate expression, it became impossible that impartial theory should continue to consider that the beautiful was adequately explained as the regular and harmonious, or as the simple expression of unity in vanity. The theory of the sublime now makes its appearance, at first indeed outside the theory of the beautiful ; but it is followed by the analysis of the ugly, which develops into a recognised branch of aesthetic inquirt’, with the result of finally establishing both the u|[ly and the sublime within the general frontier of beauty. The instrument by which this conciliation is effected is the 6 HISTORY OF iBSTHBTlC conception of the characteristic or the significant; and the conflict between the harsher elements thus recognised and the common-sense requirement that all beauty should give pleasure, is mitigated, on the one hand by a facto en- largement of average aesthetic appreciation, and on the other hand by the acceptance of such primary relations as harmony, regularity, or unity, in the light of essential elements or- ganically determining all imaginable contents, and demanding, in their degree, characteristic expression for sense. Thus in the definition of beauty above suggested, the pregnant conception contributed by the moderns is merely a re-application in more concrete matter of the formal principle enunciated by the ancients. In the widest sense, then, and omitting to insist upon the narrower and commoner usage in which the characteristic — in the sense of individually charac- teristic — is opposed to the formal or symmetrical, it would be sufficient to define beauty as “ the characteristic in as far as expressed for sense-perception or for imagination.” If, indeed, we were attempting a psychological determina- tion of the feeling that attends or constitutes the peculiar enjoyment known as the enjoyment of beauty, we should probably have to deal with a term not mentioned in the defi- nition above proposed — the term pleasure. But in attempting to analyse the content which distinguishes perceptions or imaginations productive of this enjoyment from others which are not so productive, it appears to me that we should commit a serious error of method if we were to limit “ expressiveness " or “ characterization ” either by beauty, which is the term to be defined, or by pleasantness, which is a quality not naturally coextensive with the term to be defined. The former error is not, in my judgment, wholly avoided by Goethe, when he insists that the characteristic, although essential to art, is yet a principle limited and conditioned by beauty in the strict sense, which is needed to soften the rigidity or abstraction of the characteristic. Thus the definition is made self-destruc- tive, beauty being at once the term to be defined, and an unanalysed limiting condition in the defining predicates. The latter error is committed in any such definition as that suggested by Schlegel, “ the pleasant expression of the good.” Things give pleasure sometimes because they are beautiful, and sometimes for other reasons. They are not beautiful simply because they give pleasure, but only in so far as they DEFINITION OF BEAUTY. 7 give aesthetic pleasure ; and the nature of the presentation that gives aesthetic pleasure is the matter to be ascertained. It will be seen that the part played in Goethe’s account by the term beauty or grace, as a formal condition of artistic treatment, and in Schlegel’s account by the differentia plea- sant, intended to guau-d against caricature or defect of har- mony, is transferred in the definition which 1 have ventured to suggest to the formal or general element of characteristic expression, the element of unity or totadity as symbolised by harmonious, symmetrical, or coherent dispositions of lines, surfaces, colours, or sounds. It would be tautology to super- add the condition of pleasantness to this formal element of the characteristic, if the two terms mean the same thing, as I believe that in aesthetic experience they do ; while if pleasant- ness were taken in the normal range of its psychological mean- ing, and not as thus both limited and extended by identification with (esthetic pleasantness, the definition would become in- disputably too narrow, even supposing that its other elements prevented it from being also too wide The highest beauty, whether of nature or of art, is not in every case pleasant to the normal sensibilility even of civilized mankind, and is judged by the consensus, not of average feeling as such, but rather of the tendency of human feeling in proportion as it is developed by education and experience. And what is pleasant at first to the untrained sense — a psychological fact more universal than the educated sensibility — is not as a rule, though it is in some cases, genuinely beautiful. The definition, then, should be either purely analytic of contents accepted as beautiful — purely metaphysical, if we like to call it so — or purely psychological. To introduce a psycho- logical differentia into a metaphysical definition obtained by comparing the actual data of beauty, is to introduce a factor which we cannot control, because the differentia so introduced is itself in need of analysis and limitation on purely psycho- logical ground before it will coincide with the data to be in- vestigated. . Some attempts at psychological analysis will be recorded and criticised in the course of this history ; I will at present simply suggest as an approximate psychological defi- nition of aesthetic enjoyment “ Pleasure in the nature® of a feeling or presentation, as distinct from pleasure in its momen- tary or expected stimulation of the organism.” Such pleasure would always, it is my belief, be connected in fact with the 8 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. significance of the content of feeling, but the meeting-point of the psychological and metaphysical definitions would not fall within the scope of psychology. In hope of dispelling any prejudice that may be raised against this conception on account of its apparent tendency to intellectualism, I will show in a few words how it is generated by consideration of extreme cases in the domain even of non- aesthetic feeling. If anything in the region of taste, smell, touch, heat or cold, has a value akin to that of beauty, it is not, surely, either the strongest or the most delightful sensa- tion, but rather the most suggestive sensation, or that which is most highly charged with associated ideas, so normal that we do not take them to be accidental. Not the scent of Eau-de-Cologne, but the smell of peat smoke or of the sea, not the comfortable warmth of the house, but the freshness of the morning air, are sensations of a kind in which we may feel a certain disinterested delight not wholly dissimilar to aesthetic enjoyment. The merest germ of the sense of beauty seems to imply a distinction between stimulus and signifi- tance. I have thus, I hope, justified in three respects the procedure which I intend to adopt. First, I have given my reasons for treating the history of ^Esthetic as an account, not merely of aesthetic systems, but, so far as may be in my power, of the aesthetic consciousness which has furnished material for these systems, and has formed the atmosphere in which they arose. Secondly, 1 have explained the necessity which compels aesthetic theory to accept fine art ais the main representative of the beautiful, and 1 have attempted to show that this necessity does not force us to neglect any important element of the facts with which we are to deal. Thirdly, I have propounded, in a few words, a definition of the beautiful which lends itself to the development of modern out of ancient aesthetic by a natural progression from the abstract to the concrete, analogous to the equally natural ad- vance from the classical to the Christian world of artistic pro- duction and insight into nature. And I have attempted to lay down a thorough distinction between the analytic and comparative treatment of beautiful presentations with reference to their common properties qua beautiful as progressively recognised in the development of culture, and the psychological DEFINITION OF BEAUTY, 9 inquiry into the nature and differentia of that enjoyment which these presentations produce. It is plain that these two investigations have a common frontier in the connection be- tween elements of presentation and elements of enjoyment ; but in order that they may effectually co-operate, it is essential that they should not at the outset be confused. In the next chapter I propose to begin the examination of the aesthetic feeling and theory prevalent among the ancient Hellenes. a. This definition has been condemned as obscure. Yet I haTe seen no other, professing to be more distinct, which does not rest simply on a part or consequence of the character- istic here laid down. The point is one which cannot be grasped without some attention, because it involves the distinction of two aspects of sense-perception, which probably coexist in all perceptive experience, but appear as if at a certain level the one took the place of the ether. I refer to what might roughly be called the mental and the bodily aspect of a sense- perception. There is its peculiar character, by which it addresses us differently from any other sensational content ; warm, blue, high or low (of sound), and so on. There is also the disturbance or excitement which it causes, whether pleasurable or painful, merely, I suppose, in virtue of the physical reaction to stimulus which it involves, in common with every physical reaction which enters into consciousness at all, say, for instance, organic sensation. I have expressed this distinction by the words nature” and “stimulation.” I would willingly replace “nature” by “ form,” if it were clearly understood that this had nothing to do with space or time in particular, and might include, for example, a significant intensity ; or by “ relation, ” if it were understood that this did not exclude the special sensation -quality of a colour or sound, in so far as this speaks to us differently from the content of any other sensation of the same or of another .sense. Take, for example, our pleasant feeling of the warmth of the fire on a cold day, and that of a simply pleasant colour, without pattern, say, in curtains or wallpaper. It seems to me quite plain that in the enjoyment of the colour there are two distinguishable elements. One which it has in common with higher perceptions of beauty in art and nature is an interest in the peculiar utterance of the colour as if a word in the great language of the sensuous world. It is different for every colour and spatial arrangement of colour, and different for colour from what it is fur any other sensation. It is not an abstract intellectual meaning, but it is to the colour what meaning is to a word. The other element may be described by contrast as “ physical.” It is the bare fact that in the sensation we are pleasurably excited, soothed, or gently stimulated. The supposed perception of colour has it in common with the feeling of warmth, and with many cases of the organic feelings. I do not doubt that some causal connexion exists between the two elements. But it seems to me incontrovertible that the relation is not directly proportional. The enjoyment of warmth or of health feels in one way exactly like the simple enjoyment of the colour. But it seems to be in want of something. Its “ mental ” element, or “ nature,” is hardly traceable ; its pleasant stimu* lation is almost, though not quite, a blank fact per se. Now I do not doubt that these two sides are really present in all sensation and sense- perception, from organic feeling to the highest regions of aesthetic enjoyment. But they are not proportional, and in complex cases may be discrepant, as when a “ sensation ” mars the unity of what would be a good work of art, and thereby increases the enjoyment of the weaker spectatorr The reasons for admitting the presence of the “ nature ” throughout are first that it seems a truism that every state of consciousness has a nature, if we were skilful enough to detect it ; secondly, that great writers sometimes s^ow us, through their unusually delicate analysis, the presence of a significant nature where we should fail ourselves to detect it (cf. Dr. Middleton’s praises of wine in the Egoist ) ; and thirdly, that thus by this distinc- tion we remove the difficulty arising from the early stages of almost physical attractiveness od the part of sensation, as when a child turns towards a bright light. CHAPTER II. THE CREATION OF A POETIC WORLD, AND ITS FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH REFLECTION. I. If we approach the earlier Greek philosophers, or even Plato, the prophet of beauty, expecting to find in them a simple reflex and appreciation of the plastic and poetic fancy of their countrymen, we shall be seriously disappointed. The thought of Hellas passed through all the phases which were natural to profound and ardent intelligence at first freely turned upon the world ; and the partial truths which it successively attained were uttered with a definiteness and audacity which conveys a first impression of something like perversity. When a modern reader finds that the fair humanities of old religion aroused among the wisest of early philosophers either unsparing condemnation or allegorical misconception, he is forced to summon up all his historical sympathy if he would not conclude that Heracleitus and Xenophanes and Plato, and the allegorising interpreters of whom Plato tells us, were in- capable of rational criticism. But in reality this moral and metaphysical analysis, directed against the substance of a poetic fancy which was thus beginning to be distinguished from prosaic history, was the natural sequel of artistic creation, and the natural forerunner of more appreciative theory. Creation of tbe 2. The creation of Hellenic poetry and forma- worw of Beauty, jjyg regarded as an intermediate stage between popular practical religion and critical or philoso- phical reflection. The legendary content of this art was not the work of the poet or the formative artist, but of the national mind in its long development out of savagery. Its imagina- tive form, on the other hand, was due indeed to the national mind, but to this mind chiefly as it acted through the individu- ality of poetic genius, investing the national thought and emotion with progressive significance and refinement. For although it may be doubted whether the word corresponding 19 CREATION OF A POETIC WORLD. II to beauty or the beautiful was ever used in the whole range of Hellenic antiquity in a meaning perfectly free from conm- sion with truth or goodness, yet it is certain that art is more than nature, and that the definite presentation of ideas in beautiful shape cannot but prepare the' way for an explicit sesthetic judgment by developing a distinct type of sentiment and enjoyment. Thus in Hellenic art and poetry, as it existed in the middle of the 5th century B.C., we find embodied a consciousness in relation to beauty, which, if much less than theoretically ex- plicit, is much more than practical and natural. There is a naive apprehension of a profound truth in the familiar saying of Herodotus,' that Homer and Hesiod made the Hellenic theogony, and determined the forms and attributes of the gods for Hellenic belief. The full force of this reflection is mea- sured by the interval between the early wooden image and the Phidian statue, or between the superstition of a savage and Antigone’s conception of duty. It was in the world of fine art that Hellenic genius had mainly recorded, and, in recording, had created, this transformation. for tito 3* therefore the first recognition of the Atutttde of existence and significance of art takes the shape of BofloctioiL hostility to the anthropomorphic content which it retains, we see not only that the reflective idea of beauty is still conspicuous by its absence, but that theory in advancing beyond the popular faith fails to recognise the actual refine- ment of that faith by which poetic fancy has paved the way for the speculative criticism which condemns it. On the other hand, we must observe that the criteria now actually applied — the wholly unaesthetic criteria of reality and of morality — spring from a principle from which we shall only in part escape within the limits of Hellenic antiquity. This principle is, as we shall see, that an artistic representa- tion cannot be treated as different in kind or in aim from a reality of ordinary life. To make distinction between them is always a hard lesson for immature reflection ; but for a Hellenic thinker there were reasons which made it all but impossible. The Greek world of ideas, before or outside the philosophic schools, was wholly free from dualism. Its parts were homo- geneous. The god, for example, was not conceived as an ‘ Hdt. a. S3. 2 HISTORY OF iESTHETlC. unseen being merely capable of an incarnation, such as could not express or exhaust his full spiritual nature ; rather his real shape was human, though to reveal it to mortal eye might be a rare favour, and he lived in a particular hill or in a particu* lar temple. The representation of a divine being was to the Greek not a mere symbol, but a likeness ; not ^ symbol which might faintly suggest Him who could be known only in the spirit, but a likeness of one who dwelt on earth, and whose nature was to be visible, and not to be invisible. Thus, in speaking of a question about the supernatural in Homer, Schelling has said that in Homer there is no supernatural, because the Greek god is a part of nature. And therefore, although a work of creative idealization unparalleled in the history of the world had been performed by the plastic fancy of Greece in the age that culminated with the highest art of Athens, yet in the absence of any mystic sense of an invisible order of realities the prevalent impression produced by this world of beauty was rather that of imitative representation than of interpretative origination. NeKiaeted 4- Even the idea of imitation, indeed, contains Sng^auim In the germ of a fuller aesthetic truth than was ever *** attained by Hellenic thought ; for the translation of an object into a plastic medium involves a double and not merely a single element, — not merely a consideration of the object to be represented, but a consideration of the act of imaginative production by which it is born again under the new conditions imposed by another medium. Natural com- mon sense expressed this truth in one of the earliest aesthetic judgments that Western literature contains, when on the shield of Achilles, the Homeric poet says,' “ the earth looked dark behind the plough, and like to ground that had been ploughed, although it was made of gold ; that was a marvellous piece of work." The “ marvel ” is that the mind can confer on a medium of its own choosing the characteristic semblance of what it desires to represent. But of all that depends upon this side of imitation — -the spiritual second birth of beauty — we hear but little ex- plicitly in Hellenic science, although, within defective formulae, some glimpses of it forced themselves upon Aristotle. For the reasons which have been indicated — the tendency of all '//. 17. 548. IMITATION AND IDEALISM. 13 immature reflection to judge by reality and utility, and the absence of a belief in anything which could not be visibly imitated — the poetic or creative side of artistic representation did not wholly come to its rights in antiquity. Perhaps it was even less regarded by the philosophers than it was, in the consciousness of poetic inspiration, by the epic and lyric poets, or by Plato himself outside his formal treatment of the metaphysic of imitative art. wide Use of 5. It is however the case that the term imita- uon^inj^emttion in ancient sesthetic theory is opposed rather Pbuosopby. to industrial production than to artistic origina- tion, and is compatible with a considerable variation and expan- sion of import, which I shall endeavour to trace in a separate chapter. It is natural that the earliest formula adopted by reflection should be strained to breaking point before it is abandoned. FnrthsrBx- may Still appear extraordinary to us, after piaMUon how all is Said, that the art which we contrast with OreekArtoould . ,. • , , , „ he called " imi- our own as in a peculiar sense ideal, and as equally tatiye. remote from the vicious attempt at illusion, and from the justifiable delight in detail, should have been charac- terized by enlightened opinion in its own day as a mode of imitation or mere representation. If this is our feeling, we may profitably consider in two respects the nature of the art which we are discussing. Facility of imi- *• P^^^e, just because the Hellenic tative Art makes artist or poet was free from the overwhelming sense of spiritual significance which is the essence of mystic symbolism, he was able to delineate in large and " ideal ” outlines the general impressions which he gathered from life by a scrutiny not too microscopic. It is not unnatural that the art which sets itself to portray what attracts it in a complete and actual world should be more full of repose and less tormented with the subtleties of expression than an art to which every minutest human or natural feature may be of unutterable symbolic significawce. Heuenio Art not ii. And if we thus see how an imitative art, w^aah^ unburdened with a “ mission ” or revelation, may been tbought jjg ideal simply because it is at ease ; on the other hand we must to some extent correct our traditional conception of the degree in which Hellenic beauty was devoid of strangeness, and humour, and animated expression. The 14 HISTORY OF iRSTHBTIC. critics from whom we have derived our current notions of the “ classical ” and the “ antique ” have of course performed a necessary task, and have revealed a distinction as deep as life between the ancient and the modern world. Yet, after all, the ancient world also was alive, and possessed a range of sympathetic expressiveness which was but inadequately ren- dered in the first impression made upon modern theorists by fragments of its monumental sculpture. The identification of the ancient ideal with the general or abstract, which a due regard to Greek literature might at once have proved to be a very partial truth, has been further modified by the labour of more than a century in piecing together the plastic surround- ings of this ancient life, and appreciating the descriptions which assist us to realize them. “The task before me,”* writes one whose work in this direction must be a revelation to all who are not specialists in archaeology, “ The task before me is touched with inevitable sadness. The record we have to read is the record of what we have lost. That loss, but for Pausanias, we should never have realized. He, and he only, gives us the real live picture of what the art of ancient Athens was. Even the well-furnished classical scholar pictures the Acropolis as a stately hill approached by the Propylaea, crowned by the austere beauty of the Parthenon, and adds to his picture perhaps the remembrance of some manner of Erechtheion, a vision of colourless marble, of awe, restraint, severe selection. Only Pausanias tells him of the colour and life, the realism, the quaintness, the forest of votive statues, the gold, the ivory, the bronze, the paintings on the walls, the golden lamps, the brazen palm-trees, the strange old Hermes hidden in myrtle leaves, the ancient stone on which Silenus sat, the smoke-grimed images of Athene, Diitrephes all pierced with arrows, Kleoitas with his silver nails, the heroes peeping from the Trojan horse, Anacreon singing in his cups ; all these, if we would picture the truth and not our own imagination, we must learn of, and learn of from Pausanias. “ But if the record of our loss is a sad one, it has its meed of sober joy ; it is the record also of what — if it be ever so little — in these latter days we have refound.” It is not a false opinion that harmony, severity, and repose ' Mythology and Monuments of Anct, Athens^ by Miss J. E. Harrison, xi., THE BEGINNING OF THEORY. *5 are fundamental characters of Hellenic craft and fancy ; the history of a single decorative form, such as the acanthus foliage, is enough to illustrate the profoundness of the contrast thus indicated between the antique and the modern. But we must master and adhere to the principle that although the given boundaries of Greek aesthetic theory can be in some decree justified by the comparative limitations of the art which was its material, yet this justification is only relative, and means not that Greek aesthetic was an adequate account of Greek art, but only that it wais a natural and obvious one. Thus we shall find that true aesthetic analysis among the Greeks extended only to the most formal element that enters into Hellenic beauty ; while its passion and its human signifi- cance and its touches of common things attracted the censure of an anaesthetic criticism and supported the claissification of the whole range of artistic utterance under the superficiad title of “ imitation.” Had the realism of the antique been less modest and refined, it would have challenged an analysis which would have replaced censure by explanation. But the time for this was not yet ; and it will be seen that in spite of the protests of the philosopher and the satirical comedian, theory was forced in the long run to become more subtly appi eciative as art became less severely noble. The Ground 7- We have now arrived at the point where Prepared for the Strictly philosophical Consideration of aesthetic sethetio Theory, pj^gnomena may be expected to begin. A world of beautiful shapes and fancies has been brought into being, which must of necessity have trained the perception to re- cognise beauty as displayed in the corresponding province of nature, that is, mainly in the human form, and must have developed some partly conscious sentiment of the beautiful as distinguishable from the good and the true. This imaginary world has been recognised as a new creation both negatively by the claims of the metaphysician and the moralist, and positively by the naive appreciation of the historian and the allegorising construction of the mystic.^ The mystic is the forerunner of a later age ; but the historian and the philo- sopher agree, by their acquiescence and their censure respec- tively, in treating it as claiming to pass for a simple reproduction of natural reality. And thus the immense panorama depicted by Hellenic imagination enters the range of philosophic vision under the title of mimetic or representative art. CHAPTER III. THE FUNDAMENTAL OUTLINES OF GREEK THEORY CONCERNING THE BEAUTIFUL. MdSSSroom- present chapter will be devoted to stating BMion. in logical connexion, regardless of any historical development within the limits of antiquity, the general prin- ciples which determine all Hellenic thinkers in their inquiries concerning the beautiful. The task of tracing historically the pressure which progressive insight and experience brought to bear upon these conceptions, with the consequent straining of the formulae until breaking point was reached, will be attempted in the following chapter so far as space and ability permit. The cumbrous expression, “ theory concerning the beauti- ful,” has been intentionally adopted. For of the three con- nected principles which constitute the framework of Hellenic speculation upon the nature and value of beauty, there is one only that can claim the more convenient title of “ aesthetic theory.” The two other principles in question might be respectively described as moralistic and as metaphysical, although the common root of both is itself a metaphysical assumption which is also responsible for the limitation of true aesthetic analysis in the third principle to the abstract conditions of expression. This metaphysical assumption, natural to incipient specula- tion, is to the effect that artistic representation is no more than a kind of common-place reality — of reality, that is, as presented to normal sense-perception and feeling — and that it is related precisely as the ordinary objects of perception are related, to man and his purposes, subject only to a reservation on ac- count of its mode of existence being less solid and complete than that of the objects from which it is drawn. This belief is intimately bound up with the conception of a homogeneous or thoroughly natural world, which makes it ART AN INFERIOR REALITY. *7 necessa^ to assume that the essence of art and beauty does not lie in a symbolic relation to an unseen reality behind the objects of common sense-perception, but in mere imitative relation to those common objects themselves. It was this prevalent idea that dictated the philosophical treatment to be accorded to the newly recognised phenomena of an art which produced only images of things, and not the useful realities known and handled in every-day life. It was not as yet ob- served that the ultimate import of these phenomena, involving the total separation of aesthetic semblance from practical reality, was incompatible with the idea which throughout antiquity controlled their interpretation. A sufficient verification of the predominance of this principle is to be found in the current generalisation by which both Plato and Aristotle gathered up the arts which we call the fine arts under the name “imitative” or “image-making” as contrasted in the first instance with those which are “ produc- tive ” or “ thing-making.”^ Even in Plotinus imitation is the general term which describes the attempt to create beautiful forms or fancies for the purpose of aesthetic enjoyment. It may be well also to point out a paissage in Aristotle’s Politics * which may fairly be paraphrased, as asserting that man is, as a matter of course, affected by the reality of a fact in the same way as by its representation, so that what we learn to like or dislike in the semblance for its mere form, we shall similarly like or dislike in the reality. This is a doctrine which Aris- totle in part knew how to qualify, as will be seen in the next chapter ; but Plato followed it uncompromisingly through his entire theoretical treatment of the imagination. From this metaphysical assumption there arise in close connection the two principles concerning beauty, which I have called metaphysical and moralistic respectively ; and also the restriction of aesthetic theory proper, to what is contained in the third principle. I arrange these principles in an ascend- ing order according to their aesthetic value. uoniiBtio I. If artistic representati:^n is related to man Frtaeipto. ^j^jy ^ common-place reality, then to represent an immorad content is only to double the examples of immorality, and to strengthen, by suggestion, the incitements to it. In other words, it follows that morally the representations of art * Plato, Sophisty 266 D. Ar., Fhys,^ 199 a. 15® • Ar., FoL, 1340 a. a6 ; De Fart. Anim. 645 a. 4 (see Butcher, 155). C i8 HISTORY OF iBSTHETIC must be judged, in respect of their content, by the same moral criteria as real life. 2 . If artistic representation differs from the **^®®®*^ nature which it represents, whether human or other, only in the degree and completeness of its existence, then it differs only for the worse, and is a purposeless reduplication of what already was in the world. In other words, it follows that, metaphysically, art is a second nature, only in the sense of being an incomplete reproduction of nature. Atbetio 3- If artistic presentation can never have a deeper content than the normal or common-place object of perception which it represents, then there can be no explanation of beauty involving any deeper attributes than those which normal perception is able to apprehend in com- mon-place reality. In other words, it follows that, eesthetically, beauty is purely formal, consisting in certain very abstract conditions which are satisfied, for example, in elementary geo- metrical figures zis truly as in the creations of fine art. I will discuss these principles in order, with reference to their general predominance in Hellenic theory, and to their aesthetic significance. Moniiatto I- It would be idle to deny that both Plato and mnctpia. Aristotle are encumbered with moralistic consider- ations throughout the whole of their inquiry into the nature of fine art. How far either of them approached the at cepted modern doctrine that aesthetic interest in the beauty of a pre- sentation is distinct from the real or selfish interest in its actual existence for the satisfaction of desire, is, according to the plan which 1 have adopted, a question for the next chapter. It is enough at present to establish the general point of view before us as actual in Hellenic theory by the following con- sideration. Hewn ■howl The moral and practical judgment is the first itaeir. intellectual outcome of organized social life, and is inevitably turned upon the world of beauty so long as this is undistinguished from the objects which constitute the means and purposes of real action. Not only Heracleitus and Xeno- phanes, with their condemnation of Homer, but Aristophanes, with his praise of him as a teacher of good life, and with his corresponding censure of Euripides, are examples of this mode of opinion, which, in fact, persists strongly in unpractised minds even in the modern world. MUST THE HERO BE GOOD / *9 The two great philosophers betray in this respect, though in somewhat different degrees, a naive directness of judgment extremely trying to any modern reader who is not thoroughly trained in the habit of historical appreciation. They appear to abandon themselves almost unsuspectingly to the above- mentioned principle, that the resemblance has the same effects as the normal reality. The distinction between image and object, which was destined in the long run to grow into a recognition that beauty and practical reality affect the mind in quite different ways, has for Plato mainly the effect of intensi- fying his moralistic suspicion of the unreal simulacrum which fancy supplies. For the imagination, he believes,* is psycho- logically connected with the emotions ; and therefore the imaginary world of art, while sharing the power of the real world to form habit by example, possesses that of creating emotional disturbance in a far greater degree. And it cannot be maintained that Aristotle breaks the net of this assumption, which we saw that he expressly formulates, however much he may have done to strain it. The student of modern aesthetic will find himself, when he reads the Poetics, in a region almost wholly strange to his ideas of criticism. It is plain, for example, that Aristotle shrinks from a true tragic collision,* in which passion or character determine the indi- vidual’s destiny, and this in spite of the abundance in which such individualities as those of Prometheus, Clytaemnestra, Qidipus, Aias, Antigone and Medea, were presented to his view by ancient tragedy. And the reaison plainly lies in his subjec- tion of all criticism to his division of character into good, bad, and indifferent,® excluding, ipso facto, all that conflict of a great passion or purpose with the surrounding world, in which tragic interest properlv consists, and which make the character a symbol of forces that lie behind the phenomena of life as named by current morality. The conclusion that the hero of tragedy must be neither very good nor very bad,* and that his fate must be determined by error* and not by wickedness, is unintelligible to modern judgment, think that the hero may be both very good and very bad, that is to say, that he must abov#* all things be great, and comprehend in himself the * Republic, p. 606. * Poet., xiii. 3 and 4. See Susemihl’s notes, which represent Aristotle’s idea in the most modern colours possible. ® nU. *■ Ibid. 20 HISTORY OF ^THETIC. differences which make possible the highest discord, and there- fore the highest harmony. All these ideas are excluded ab initio by the moralistic categories under which Aristotle sub- sumes his species of tragic plots. Then again, ^ we should expect, it is his preference ^ that the fatal action in which a tragedy culminates should be done in ignorance, and its nature only discovered afterwards ; for the discovery, if made in time, would have, he thinks, the effect of preventing the terrible action from taking place. The plot of the Medea, which he mentions in this context, is therefore naturally censured by implication as shocking. So, too, with the classification of artists. Here the natural pre-eminence of the moralistic point of view is very trenchantly laid down. It is simplest to quote the passage (the point being to distinguish species of imitation, according to the objects which they imitate): — * “ Now all artistic representation is of persons acting, and these must necessarily be either noble or inferior (for all moral temperament [ethos] conforms to this distinction ; for it is goodness and badness of moral temperament by which all men are distinguished from each other) — that is, either better in comparison with us, or worse, or just like ourselves. So we may see with the painters : Polygnotus painted people better, Pauson worse, Dionysius just like ourselves. From all this it is clear, that each of the kinds of representation which has been mentioned will include these differences, and will have different species according as the objects which it repre- sents differ in this way. For these dissimilarities may occur even in dancing or in performances on the flute or the lyre, and so too poetry may display them whether it be with or without verse ; for instance, Homer represents nobler char- acters, Kleophon average ones. Hegemon of Thasos, the first to make parodies, and Nicochares, who wrote the Deliad, below the average. . . . And this is the difference that distinguishes tragedy from comedy, for the latter aims at representing worse people, and the former better, than those of present reality.” Here again the student, not only of Shakespeare and Goethe, but of Homer and of the Attic drama, entirely loses his bearings. It seems to him that the poetic world is stronger * Pott.f xiv. 6, 8, 9. * Pott., ii. GREEK MORALISM. 31 and more emphatic in its attributes, alike in the good as in the evil, than the world of every-day life, as presented to every- day observation. What about Thersites ? as Mr. Mahaffy asks. The poet who should represent individuals as only better than common men, or again as only worse, would be to us simply a monster, except in so far as the art of Aristo- phanic comedy is concerned ; and even here the adjective “worse,” with its moralistic associations, does not at all express the true bearing of the representation, which it seems probable that Aristotle was unable to appreciate. Many subtleties might be urged against this interpretation of Aristotle, and to some of them it will be attempted to do justice when we speak of modifications within Hellenic theory. But it does not appear to me that we should be justified in hampering ourselves by such refinements, to the extent of denying that Plato and Aristotle had their feet firmly planted within the compass of naive practical moralism, however much they may have looked away to other and more fertile regions. j8. It must be remembered, however, that grant- iEsthetio ®*'ing the almost total absence of a distinctively aesthetic standpoint, there is no form in which a healthy sense of relative values could assert itself with respect to art, except the form of moralistic criticism. The content of such a criticism is the determination that the central core of life shall have justice done to it in the representation of life, and this determination is characteristic of the temper in which not only genuine speculation, but the greatest works of art, have always originated. The development of moral reflection by Plato into apparent hostility to nearly the whole world of classical beauty must be regarded historically speaking as a reduction ad absurdum, not of the human content, but of the non-aesthetic form of the principle which he professed to be advocating. And it is hard to believe that in this and other respects he was wholly unaware of some such ironical import ii^his own speculations. The technical defect thus revealed consists in substituting a direct connection of subordination for an indirect connection of co-ordination between the spheres of beauty and of the moral order. By this subordination beauty is required to represent the moral order as moral, and nothing more ; whereas it is really an expression, co-ordinate with the moml 22 HISTORY OF iCSTHRTIC order as a whole and not bound under its rules, of that larger complication and unity of things which reflects itself in the sense of beauty on the one hand, and on the other hand in the social will. But not only is the substance of early moral criticism sound; in one definite relation even its form is justifiable. Beauty, indeed, within its own territory of expression for expression’s sake, is secure from praise or censure upon purely moral grounds. But wherever expression is not for expres- sion’s sake, but is determined by alien motives such as the promotion of virtue or knowledge, or again the stimulation of sensuous desire, then it is outside the aesthetic frontier, and moral criticism upon it is justified not only in substance but also in form. It is doubtful, indeed, whether ancient philosophy ever thoroughly applied the distinction between aesthetic and practical interest ; but it is plain that this very failure to distinguish between them in theory is largely owing to the constant confusion between them in practice, and that the censure which pronounced much of fine art to be immoral involved a consciousness that true aesthetic interest must be pure, and was only mistaken in admitting that which it con- demned to be fine art at all. Then the estimation of beauty by the practical standard of right and wrong, although unaesthetic in form, contains two elements of aesthetic value. It bears witness to the instinctive demand for depth and completeness in art as representing the powers that reveal themselves in that order of the world of which the moral order is one among other significant reflec- tions ; and it embodies the conviction that there is a spurious art and beauty, which being not free but subservient to a practical or sensuous end, cease to be objects of aesthetic judg- ment and become the legitimate prey of moral censure or commendation. And censure of these must indeed always be one degree truer than commendation ; for a fraud, however pious, can never be wholly satisfying to morality. Now the pretence of beauty, in a presentation the true interest of which is other than aesthetic, must always be in some degree a fraud. A difficulty presents itself at this point which cannot be treated in full till we come to deal with the niceties of modern analysis. At present we can only observe that this distinction between free and servile or spurious beauty depends not on PLATO ON IMITATION. 23 the description, necessarily abstract as all language is, which the artist or percipient may give of his own purpose or ground of enjoyment, but on the degree in which, as a matter of fact, an abstraction due to an alien purpose of any kind whatever is apparent as distorting the presentation: TticKetapiiyBiaai 2. The formative and poetic art of Hellas at Frinoipie. close of the 5th Century B.c. had attained a completeness in itself which was emphasized by a pause in its development and an indication of new tendencies. It was natural that at such a moment its significance should challenge the attention of the great contemporary philosopher, and also that his treatment of it should consist in an explicit formulation of the current Hellenic conception, such as on the one hand to lay by its help the foundation-stone of all sound aesthetic theory, while on the other hand to exhibit by a reductio ad absurdum the onesidedness of the conception itself. In estimating the achievement of such a philosophy, it is not necessary to consider how far it was intentional. We have to accept its doctrines in their actual significance, and not to inquire whether Plato may ever have entertained any other view of art and imagination than that which he found it necessary to analyse. Bow It show* a. I quote a passage which summarises the itBoit doctrine of Plato’s well-known polemic against all representative art.' “ And there is another artist [besides the workman who makes useful real things]. 1 should like to know what you would say of him. Who is he } One who is the maker of all the works of all other workmen. . . . This is he who makes not only vessels of every kind, but plants and animals, himself and all other things — the earth and heaven, and the things which are in heaven or under the earth ; he makes the gods also, . . . Do you not see that there is a way in which you could make them yourself ? — there are many ways in which the feat might be accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round — you would soon make the sun and the heaven and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and all the other creatures of art as well as of nature in the mirror. * Republic, bk. x. Jowett, maig., p. 596-7. 24 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. " Yes, he said ; but that is an appearance only. “ Very good, I said, you are coming to the point now ; and the painter, as I conceive, is just a creator of this sort, is he not ? “ Of course. “ But then I suppose you will say that what he creates is untrue. And yet there is a sense in which the painter also creates a bed ? “ Yes, he said, but not a real bed. " And what of the manufacturer of the bed ? did you not say that he does not make the idea which, according to our view, is the essence of the bed, but only a particular bed ? “ Yes, I did. “ Then if he does not make that which exists he Ccinnot make true existence but only some semblance of existence ; and if any one were to say that the work of the manufacturer of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth. — No wonder then that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth. — Well then here are three beds, one existing in nature which as 1 think that we may say, is made by God — there is another which is the work of the carpenter ? And the work of the painter is a third ? Beds then are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them : God, the manu- facturer of the bed, and the painter ? — God, whether from choice or necessity, created one bed in nature and one only ; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God. . . . Shall we then speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed ? “ Yes, he replied, inasmuch as by the natural power of creation He is the author of this and of all other things. " And what shall we say of the carpenter ; is not he also the maker of the bed ? *' Yes. “ But would you call the painter a creator and maker ? Certainly not. “Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed .>* “ I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make. “ Good, I said ; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an imitator ; and the tragic poet is an POPULAR NOTIONS OF ART. 25 imitator, and therefore like all other imitators he is thrice removed from the king^ and from truth ? “ That appears to be the case. Then about the imitator we are agreed And now about the painter ; I would like to know whether he imitates that which originally exists in nature, or only the creations of artists [artificers] ? “ The latter. “ As they are, or as they appear ? you have still to determine this. — I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality. Which is the art of painting — an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear — of appearance or of reality ? “ Of appearance. “Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth and can do all things because he only lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example : a painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artificer, though he knows nothing of their arts ; and if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter. And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that everybody knows, and every single thing, with a higher degree of accu- racy than any other man — whoever tells us this, 1 think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation. And so when we hear persons saying that the tragedians and Homer, who is at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as well as vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet must know what he is talking about, and that he who has not^^this knowledge can never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also there is not a similar illusion. Perhaps they may have been deceived by imitators, and may never have remembered when they saw their works that these were but imitations thrice ^ The allusion is to bk. ix. p. 586 ff. HISTORY OF iGSTHBIK:. removed from the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth, because they are appearances only, and not real substances ? Or perhaps after all they may be in the right, and poets do really know the things about which they seem to the many to speak well ? — Now do you suppose that if a person were ad>le to make the originad as well as the image, he would devote himself to the image- making branch ? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as though he could do nothing better ? — The real artist who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations ; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair ; and instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.” Here we see the theory of imitation laid down in a definite metaphysical form, ostensibly as an annihilating criticism on the value and reality of art, though consisting in a simple formulation of the current conception regarding it. Three decisive points in the passage call for our notice. Esthetic i- Art works with images only and not with sunbiance. realities such as can act or be acted upon in the world of ordinary life. Eeiattonto These images are not symbolic of the ulti- Oommon Beauty, mate reality as created by God ; that is, in our language, of the relations and conditions which to a perfect knowledge would be present as determining or constituting any real object in the order of nature. The appearances in which fine art consists are superficially imitative of the second or common-place reality which is relative to every-day purpose and sense- perception. lufarioTity by iii- The images of art must be judged — and tua standard, therefore condemned — by their capacity of repre- senting common reality either with sensuous completeness or with intellectual thoroughness ; the reality is in every way preferable to the imitation,* and, it is added lower down, even beauty depends on a correct representation of use. Of these three characteristic assertions the first must be reserved for treatment under the head of aesthetic value. Here we need only observe that it is fundamentally and abso- lutely true. * Plato. Rtp; p. 6oi. DUALISM IN PLATO AND AKISTOTLE. If The second and third constitute the dififerentia of the non- aesthetic account of art natural to Hellas; and till their contentions are fairly challenged and repudiated, we are safe in saying that no true aesthetic of representative or concrete art has been attained or is possible. For,- so long as they are admitted, the standard of judgment lies ex hypothesi in ihe appearance and purposes of reality as accepted by every-day action and experience. Whether Plato is serious or consistent with himself in in- sisting that the relation of art is to the " second,” and not to the “ first " reality, does not concern us here. It is sufficient to note that the essence of a mimetic theory could not be more trenchantly formulated than by this classification of realities, on the assumption which 1 believe to be indisputable, that Plato’s first and highest reality has for us an intelligible meaning as practically corresponding to the completest con- ception in which the order of nature can be presented to a human mind. It may occur to the reader that Aristotle, not holding to the metaphysical dualism so sharply expressed by Plato in the passage which has been quoted, was not under the necessity of repudiating the relation of art to common reality there laid down, so definitely as Plotinus afterwards repudiated it. Com- mon perceptible reality, it would then be alleged, contained for Aristotle the true real and universal, and therefore the dependence of art upon the former was not for him definitely separable from its dependence upon the latter. And hence, it might be urged, the refinements which we shall find in his theory and his criticism, are not mere practical qualifications of the old conception, forced upon him by increasing critical experience and closer observation of the healthy love of beauty, but are satisfactory evidence of a fundamental change of standpoint in the direction away from the mimetic and towards the symbolic art-consciousness. I believe, however, that such a view would be erroneous. In the first place, the difference between Plato and Aristotle^in regard to philo- sophical dualism is not at all such as is commonly supposed, or such as the above passage from the Republic might lead a reader to imagine, who is unacquainted with the varying and subtle gradations in which the so-called “doctrine of ideas” presents itself throughout Plato’s writings. The appearance of dualism is produced by efforts to apprehend the principle 28 HISTORY OF iESTHETXC. that the object is relative to the subject, and bearing this principle in mind we shall not find more than a difference in degree between the metaphysical position of the two great philosophers. The distinction between reality for perception and reality for thought is essentially the same to both of them. And in the second place, if we add to the evidence above referred to regarding Aristotle’s moralistic position that which has also been adduced with respect to his view on the effect of resemblance in comparison with that of reality, and if we observe the weak psychological qualification by which alone he limits this latter principle,* we cannot doubt that as a matter of fact Aristotle thoroughly adhered in metaphysical as in moral criticism to the conception of art as a mimetic 1 epresentation of the world‘s in the shape which it takes for normal action and perception. ita iEntbeuc This metaphysical estimate of image-making Value. fjfjg closely associated at least in Plato with an analogous psychological estimate of the imagination, although in form non-aesthetic, and profoundly hostile to the value of the poetic world, is in substance an important foundation- stone of aesthetic theory. jsgthetic sem- i- It is not Sufficiently recognised that in the biance. Polemic of Republic, Book X., taken in con- junction with other well-known passages in Plato, there is laid down the essential doctrine of aesthetic semblance as plainly as in Schiller or in Hegel. The imputation of inferiority — that- the appearance is superficial compared to the sensuous reality — is of merely transient importance in itself, but is of the highest significance as a phase of estimation through which the aesthetic appearance must naturally pass on its way to com- plete recognition as distinct from common-place fact. The double-edged nature of the phenomena of imitation now neces- sarily begins to reveal itself. “To imitate,” means no doubt to produce a likeness of ; but what is a likeness ? In what medium does it exist Of what relations to practice and to reaility is it capable ? To all these questions the criticism of naive metaphysic has its answers. A likeness is a projection or superficial reproduction of a real thing, in a medium in- capable of exhausting the content of the original reality, or of fulfilling the purposes or satisfying the interests which ‘ See ch. iv. iSSTHETlC SEMBLANCE. 29 attach to it And art is constituted entirely of likenesses, and its mentd medium is the imagination or image-receiving faculty The censure of inutility which follows upon this trenchant distinction, by denying the naive conception of an adequate relation to reality, leads us to the recognition of an aesthetic interest which is not that of utility, nor of relation to any satisfaction connected with the sensuous impulses. More- over, when Plato insists that the appearances employed by the artist are in relation not with the unseen world of thought and law, but with a lower reality which is itself only an image of that unseen world, it is impossible not to observe in mis a strong though negative suggestion of the function of beauty as a symbol for spiritual things. And indeed as regards beauty, though not as regards art, this suggestion even takes a positive form, when it is laid down * that the Creator in making the world beautiful necessarily modelled it on the ultimate underlying order ; whereas anything modelled upon the created world itself, and therefore especially such presen- tations as those of art, must inevitably be devoid of beauty. There could not be a more definite challenge to subsequent reflection, which could hardly fail to ask, whether to reveal the beautiful in the deeper significance thus accorded to created things might not be the purpose and essence of art. Semblance In- adequate to Reality. ii. Besides enforcing the truth implied in the mimetic theory, Plato reduces to an absurdity its element of falsehood. This element, it must be remembered, he found expressed in the reflective opinion of his time,* just as he found an element of non-aesthetic in- terest in its artistic practice. All that he has to do, is to for- mulate the received opinion with perfect self-consistency, and draw the inference which immediately presents itself. Whether in his own mind he sympathized with that inference, I be- lieve that we can never know. If it were possible to con- jecture, on the basis of his general and less strictly scientific utterances, I should venture to think it possible that the pro- blem pressed upon him as one of fundamental importance ; that the current Hellenic theory, within which he found himself, agreed only too well with some phenomena of existing art, and was profoundly unsatisfactory to the great thinker ; and that he therefore examined this theory seriously, with the re- * Tmatus^ 28 B. *lc. above, p. 25 30 HISTORY OF iSSTHBTIC suit, “ If, and in as far as, this is the true explanation of art, art has not the value which popular judgment assigns to it.” The further suggestion, “There must be more in it than this,” must no doubt have presented itself to him, as we can partly see, in various forms, with various degrees of explicitness and urgency. But his final utterance as a metaphysical theorist on representative art considered as imitation of reality, is in brief : "so far as the value of aesthetic appearance depends either upon its sensuous or upon its intellectual adequacy to natural and human reality so far it is a failure and does not merit the attention of serious men.” That is to say, either artistic representation is worthless, or, out of the conditions imposed and possibilities revealed by reproduction in the medium of appearance, there must be developed an aim and interest, other than the aim and interest presented by the reality which is represented. It should be added that al- though the conclusion as here stated and motived is absolutely just, yet there is also a minor question of true aesthetic in- volved in discussing the degree of the artist’s actual know- ledge. Though his object is not to rival reality, but to seize its suggestions, he depends profoundly and increasingly on his knowledge of it, which Plato seems to us to under-estimate. The above negative result, together with the former and positive result that “ Art has its being in appearance,” not yet extended to the generalization “ that beauty has its being in appearance,” form the elements of permanent aesthetic value contained in the metaphysical principle upon which Hellenic theory concerning fine art is founded. jEsthette 3* We now approach the consideration of the one true aesthetic principle recognised by Hellenic antiquity m general. This may be described as the principle that beauty consists in the imaginative or sensuous expression of unity in variety. I call this an aesthetic principle in contradistinction to the moralistic and metaphysical principles which we have hitherto been examining, because it raises no question of other attri- butes or relations in the beautiful object, such as conducive- ness to virtue, or degree of reality, nor does it involve the assumption which underlies such questions, that art is a mere reflection of nature ; but it does, directly and in general form, attempt a solution of the problem, “VVhat is the nature of beauty as a characteristic of experienced presentations ” FORMAL BEAUTY. 3 * The Hellenic answer to such a question was necessarily formal. The reasons for which art appeared at first to be the mere reproduction of reality are ^o the reascms which prohibited esthetic analysis from insisting on the concrete significance of what is b^utiful in man and in nature. So long as common reality — the object of average percep- tion — is regarded as the standard of art, there is an insur- mountable barrier against the identification of beauty with the spiritual expressiveness which only a higher perception can apprehend. Or, in other words, to accept the imitation of nature^ in the widest sense as the function of art, is simply to state the problem of concrete beauty in the rudest manner possible, admitting a total inability to solve it For to say that the material of beautiful presentation is in some way drawn from the objects of sense-perception does not touch the question, " What can art do m&re than nature ? ” But when we ask in what respects, that is, in virtue of what general character or conditions, a reality, whether presented or repre- sented, is beautiful, then we have raised the specific question of aesthetic science. And to this a mimetic theory, for which one reality is, in strictness, ais good a model as amother, has ex hyfotkesi no answer. But there are simple cases and traits of beauty which either have nothing to do with the direct representation of life and nature, or are to be found in such representations merely ais limiting conditions imposed by the same principles which con- stitute the entire content erf the former and simpler cases of beauty. The analysis of these cases and characteristics is not barred by the mimetic theory, which has only a remote and metaphorical application to them. And although we asserted that for ordinary Greek life there was no unseen or spiritual world to which a sensuous presentation could be related as a mere symbol, yet the most general principles of action and knowledge soon, became familiar to the intelligence of so gifted a race, and were naturally applied by its thinkers as spiritual principles to the analysis of such formal and abstract beauty as obviously did not consist in ^e reproduction of natural reality. In dealing with a true aesthetic conception we need not, as before, separate the account of its application from the esti- mate of its aesthetic value. A review of the cases in which it is appUedi, beginning with, the most general statements of its 3* HISTORY OF ^THETIC. range, forms the best criticism of the principle, which may be further elucidated at the close of this chapter by comparison with some modern researches, oeiwni state- Synthesis of the one and the many was, rnenta in Anoient as we all know, the central problem and the cen- WTiters. achievement of Greek philosophy. The con- ception of unity in variety is the indispensable basis of that idea of system or totality of interdependent parts, which was destined to be the structure erected by modern speculation upon the definite foundation laid by the Greek thinkers. The relation of whole to part — a slightly more concrete ex- pression for unity in variety — has never been more perfectly elucidated and more justly appreciated than by Plato and Aristotle, and it is in recognising the satisfaction afforded to the mind by the sensuous or imaginative embodiment of this relation that they make a first step in genuine aesthetic analysis. When we say with approval of a poem or of a musical composition, that it has a beginning, middle and end, we are probably not aware that we are repeating a principle which Aristotle, in dealing with the drama, after the precedent of a less explicit paussage in Plato,* has defined with naive pro- foundness. "A tragedy * is a representation of a whole action — a whole is what has beginning, middle, and end. A begin- ning is what does not necessarily come after something else, but is so constituted as to have something else come after it ; an end, on the contrary, is what is so constituted ais to come after something else but to have nothing after it ; and a middle is what is so constituted as to come after something else and also to have something else after it — for beauty depends upon size [so that the relation of the parts may be appreciable] and order.” 3o, again, we may often hear about any beautiful object, “it w’ould be impossible to add or take away the smallest part without spoiling it.” This is genuine Greek aesthetic. “ Just as,” Aristotle says,® “ in all other representative arts a single representation is of a single object, so the story [of a drama] being the representation of an action, must be of a single one, which is a whole ; and the parts of the scheme of incidents must be so arranged that if any part is transposed or removed ^ Phe^ruSy 268 D. See ch. iv. * AT*, vii. 1-4. ^ Po€i,^ viii. 4. FORMAL BEAUTY. 33 the whole will be disordered and shattered ; for that of which the presence or absence makes no appreciable difference is no part of the whole.” Moreover, the relation of the one to the tnany or of the part to the whole is represented in comparative purity by geometrical figures, or again by rhythms or spatial intervals that bear numerical relation to one another. And for this reason Greek philosophy is inclined to select mathematical form, ratio, or proportion, as the pure and typical embodi- ment of beauty. “Now since the good and the beautiful are different (for the former is always a property of action, but the latter extends to objects free from motion), those are mistaken who affirm that the mathematical sciences say nothing of beauty or good- ness. For they most especially discern and demonstrate the facts and definitions relating to them ; for if they demon- strate the facts and definitions relating to them, though with- out naming the qualities in question, that is not keeping silence about them. The main species [elements ? etdij] of beauty are order, symmetry, definite limitation, and these are the chief properties that the mathematical sciences draw attention to,” ^ 1 subjoin a passage from Plato, to which reference will have to be made again. It is worth while to observe that almost all the actual material of Aristotle’s thought, as distinct from the method of his treatment, may, as in this case, be discovered in Plato. “ The principle of goodness has reduced itself to the law of beauty. For measure and proportion always pass into beauty and excellence.” * “ I do not mean by the beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning ; but, says the argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane and solid figures which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles ; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and abso- lutely beautiful, and they have peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the pleasures of irritating an itching place (which has been taken above as the type of pleasure mixed with pain). And there are colours which are of the same character, and have similar pleasures. . . . When sounds are smooth and * Ar., Metaph., 1078 a. * Philebus, marg., p. 64. D 34 HISTORY OF jliSTHETIC. clear, and utter a single pure tone, then I mean to say they are not relatively but absolutely beautiful, and have a natural pleasure associated with them.” ' The exclusion of life and pictures of life, in this passage, from the realm of absolute beauty, to which regularity and unity are essential, is a striking case of the limitation which we have seen to be inherent in Greek sesthetics. The concrete individual unity which underlies the apparent disorder of the beauty of life was not likely to be appreciated until after the same principle had been recognised in the more abstract or formal cases and conditions of its embodiment. And it is plain that formal beauty, as recognised in such passages as these, of which all Greek philosophy is full, is constituted by a symbolic relation — a presentation to sense of a principle which is not sensuous. Such “ presentation,” in default of a more precise term, may sometimes be called an " imitation ” ; * but it is impossible to “ imitate ” a non- sensuous principle in a sensuous medium. Parttcoiar Of such symbolism or presentation we find Cues. jjjg following principal cases to have attracted the ittention of Plato or Aristotle. Ooionr and i* There is no more obvious type of unity appeal- Ton^ jng tQ sense than is to be found in the self-identical quality of a colour extended in space or of a tone extended In time. These, as was shown in the passage quoted above from the Philebus, Plato recognised as beautiful,® and, accord- ing to the whole context of the passage and the expressions employed in describing the sounds in question, for the reason here suggested, namely as sensuous presentations of unity. Not, of course, that this is the reason apprehended by the subject whose enjoyment is being analysed. That would at once transfer beauty from perception to reflection. It is only suggested as the cause, observed and assigned by the theorist who is conducting the analysis ab extra. The same observation upon the beauty of pure colours and sounds as types of unity in diversity is made by Kant, and will have to be considered as a question of modern testhetic. It is obvious that not only the facts of artistic perception, but the physical analysis furnished by science, throw a certain difficulty in the way of the explanation. For if “pure” means 1 Philebus, marg., p. 51. ' RtpubL, iii. 400 A. * Cf., Timaus, So B. FORMAL BKAUTY. 35 unmixed, as Kant defines it to mean, are such pure sounds or colours, even if they can be said to exist at all, the most beau- tiful? It will be found however that the explanation will maintain itself, though in a more subtle form than that suggested by Plato, or even by Kant Mr. Ruskin’s account of “ Purity as the type of divine energy,” ^ while solving the difficulties referred to, presents a wonderful analogy with the idea as it first dawned on Plato. Eiemeiitaiy Elementary geometrical forms, even the straight line, and more particularly certain tri- angles, are set down as absolutely beautiful.* We have interpreted this to mean that they are among the purest examples of unity in the form of simple regular or symmetrical shape. Strange as this assertion may appear to our aesthetic per- ception, which demands a more varied and concrete revelation of order or unity, I do not think that it can justly be denied. There is a degree of beauty belonging to every shape or structure which in any way affects perception with a sense of regularity or symmetry, that is, of the unity of parts in a whole as it displays itself where the whole is lacking in highly concrete differentiation. And if we bear in mind that architecture and decorative ornament, of the severe though refined type congenial to Greek civilisation, fell outside the frontier of imitative repro- duction, we may better understand how a Greek theorist might be content with a plain curve as a type of beauty, and how such a type might really involve a degree of delightful refine- ment which later ages have not again attained by such simple means. Plato indeed is apparently contemplating such examples as the straight line and the circle ; whereas, if our experts may be trusted, these most abstract of shapes are replaced in Hellenic architecture and decoration by delicate curves due to the skilled eye and hand of the artist-workman. But this contrast would only show, what the whole history of aesthetic must illustrate that theory follows but tardily after practice. In such cases as the above, although the principle of unity is presented under very different sensuous embodiments, yet they all agree in being highly abstract, and the principle * Jlfad. PainUrs, vol. iL * Phtlebus, l.c., Timxus, l.c., At-h Mftaph., Lc. 36 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. therefore appears rather as their substance than as their limit- ing form. In any case we have here solid observations of aesthetic fact. If the explanation which Greek theory offers should appear inadequate, still it has done good service in drawing attention to these simple instances of beauty, which would in that case have to be dealt with on one or other of the two extreme views known respectively as Formal ^Es- thetic, and as the ^Esthetic of Feeling. We now turn to those cases in which the abstract principle of unity is plainly inadequate to the concrete significance of the content, and yet is the only aesthetic explanation of it which Greek theory could furnish. Here, then, organic unity though alleged to be the substance is in fact nothing more than the condition of beauty, simple Sour- ih* Plato’s restriction of permissible music to mwde. ygj.y simple song-tunes of a severe type, although it has a moralistic aspect, is also a result and example of his genuine but inadequate aesthetic. The long discussion of music and metre in the third book of the Republic, in which the conception of unity that permeates the ideal common- wealth is repeatedly contrasted with the multiplicity and variety inherent in imitative or dramatic music, makes it plain that the simple song-tune is acceptable to Plato partly because he is able to formulate to himself its symbolic function as expressive of a principle which has profound import for the soul. The music which he rejects is partly indeed for him. expressive of evil — and so far his rejection of it is moralistic and not aesthetic — but to a far greater extent its defect in his eyes consists in being concretely reproductive of natural reality, and therefore not expressive of ideas nor related to life in any way that he is able to comprehend. And his refusal on this ground to recognise such music as healthy art is a proof of genuine aesthetic insight. What has no expres- siveness is not beautiful. As a matter of fact very simple tunes ' have an unrivalled capacity of symbolising elementary moods and ideas. Aristotle, following Plato, observes upon this phenomenon with results to which we shall have to return in the next chapter. and iv. The extreme generality of the principle which Ucioai wboiei. j^fg tracing in its applications produced a dan- ^ Mr. L. Nettleship in Abbott’s Helhnita, p. ii8. THE BEAUTIFUL SOUL. 37 ger of confusion which Greek philosophy did not entirely escape. But we must not overrate the extent of this evil. It is true that we constantly find in Plato fine arts or their productions compared, in respect of systematic reasonableness,* both with moral or political relations arid with industrial or non-representative crafts. But we must bear in mind that this is an absolutely just comparison, so long as it only serves to insist upon the common character of organic unity by help of the pre-eminent examples which fine art affords. The comparison of a member in a political whole to a feature in a statue,* with regard to the subordination which is essential in the one case as in the other, is perfectly adequate for the purpose for which Plato employs it. And no one is entitled to accuse him of a confusion between morality and aesthetic because he compares right and beauty in a point in which they are fairly comparable. But although it is an error to charge Plato on this ground with introducing aesthetic ideas into ethical or logical reason- ings, yet there was one direction in which, owing to the generality of its principle, Greek aesthetic unquestionably cast its net too wide. Beauty, as we understand it, is only for sense and for sensuous imagination. The “ beautiful soul ” of modern romance appears to derive its appellation from a metaphor which indicates a certain directness of delight afforded by the contemplation of its spiritual qualities, analogous to the direct- ness of delight which attends the perception of sensuous beauty. Beauty of soul, or beauty in the supra-sensuous world, as recognised by Greek philosophy,* depends upon a some- what similar metaphor, enforced by a degree of failure in differentiating the unreflective traditional use of the term “beautiful” and therefore partaking of the nature of a confusion, although an expressive confusion. More espe- cially the notion of an intellectual conception or archetype of beauty such as itself to be beautifuUis a very serious mis- take in aesthetic. We should have hoped to find that beauty was regarded as essentially the sensuous expression — not of the beautiful, nor even of the good — but simply of the real. ‘ Republic, i. 349 D. * Republic, iv., init. * Plato, Phctdrus, passim, and Ar., Rhei., 1366 A. HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. 3 « This idea is plainly close at hand in the distinction between the beautiful and the good, but is destroyed by the co-ordina- tion of the two as equally archetypes in a supra-sensuous world. We must not however make the matter worse than it is. It is not the case that the principle of beauty, though in metaphorical passages spoken of as beautiful, was alleged to be the sole genuine beauty to the exclusion of the things of sense. Plato does not regard it as a mistake to believe in the beauty apparent to educated sense-perception ; on the contrary, both he and Aristotle make the acquisition of such perceptive capacity a main purpose of education. What he censures is not the belief in many beautiful things, but in many conflicting " beauties ‘ that is, conflicting principles or standards of beauty. Tbe LeiB«r Arts Granting however that the generality of the and relation of whole and part misled the Greeks PormauveArt making their aesthetic theory too wide in one direction, it at least encouraged them not to make it too narrow in another. If they erred by including moral and mental qualities in beauty, they did not err, as modern philo- sophy has been apt to, by neglecting to notice the lesser arts and handicrafts as within the region of the beautiful. Al- though, as we have seen, the distinction between representa- tive and directly productive art was forcing itself into prominence in the fifth century b.c., yet no such contrast as that between art and industry had as yet entered into ordinary language ; and the profession, the trade, the craft, and the fine art, were all designated by the same term, and regarded alike as examples of reasonable systematic activity. And wherever such activity took form in objects that ap- pealed to sense-perception, there, for the Greek philosopher, the aesthetic sphere was entered. But with regard to the content to be expressed in their varied concrete shapes, from the works of architecture and decoration and the accompanying lesser crafts of life to the great independent formative arts of painting and sculpture, theory in Hellenic antiquity takes us no deeper than the analysis which seemed adequate for the beauty of a simple * Mepublic, v. 479 D, '* Ta rStv woXXmv mXXa vofu/ta xoAoC rc vtpl koI tu>v EXPRESSIVE WORKMANSHIP. 39 curve, say, of a plain moulding, or of a single colour or tone. “ And * all life is full of them,” we read in the Republic, ^ the close of the discussion on music and metre before re- ferred to, “ as well as every constructive and creative art — painting, weaving, embroidery, the art of -building, the manu- facture of utensils, as well as the frames of animals and of plants ; in all of them there is grace* or the absence of grace." It is worth noticing that the beauty of animals, and of plants is here mentioned in the same line with the beauty of various arts, showing how impossible it is to distinguish in any theoretical treatment between the direct perception or beauty of nature and the artistic perception or beauty of art. The limitation is remarkable as well as the inclusion. We find nothing about the mountains, or the sea, or the sky, and might have risked the suggestion that the forms of inanimate nature had not caught the eye of the Greek artist and critic, were it not for the magnificent sense of cloud movement, revealed without warning or sequel by Aristophanes.* Certainly how- ever the Greek expression for “ painter” in the sense of artist — a painter of living things — is full of strange suggestiveness. In all this region of expressive workmanship, which we must judge not merely by its relics but by written records, aesthetic theory had nothing to point out but propriety of form (“ grace ”), rhythm, symmetry or balance. But in presence of concrete significance and expression all these ideas sink into postulates, that the relation of the unity to the diversity or of the whole to the part shall be right and just ; shall be, that is to say, whatever the individual import of the presentation may demand, subject to a general regard for the principle of systematic reasonableness as one that can never be neglected without loss in any sensuous or imaginative expression. Much as these postulates signified to the Greeks — whose splendid composition, we are told, distinguishes their commonest work * from that of all other beauty-loving men — they are in themselves, for aesthetic theory, mere abstract formulae or conditions, embodying only the fundamental fact that system is the first law of expression. Poetry aad the vi. And even in reflecting upon the rnodt profoundly human of all arts, upon poetry and ^ Republic^ Jowett's trans., marg., p. 401. * Evo-xi/fwwrvny. * Clauds^ 323 ff. * on Art^ Poynter, p. 69. 40 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. the tragic drama, Aristotle has little to say within ssthetic limits that does not flow from the postulated relation of part to whole.’ We have seen how pregnantly he succeeds in treating this formal condition of art, and it would be wrong to depreciate the conception of dramatic unity and consistency which modern criticism inherited from him, and was long unable to appreciate in the full depth of its author’s meaning. We have thus seen exemplified within the limits of Greek theory that relation between formal and individual expression which was embodied in our definition of the beautiful, and which also determines the direction of progress from ancient to modern aesthetic. In music and poetry, indeed, the relation did not lend itself to a simple demarcation between two regions of each of these arts, although it expressed itself in the difficulty of appreciat- ing their more complex forms. But within the limits of formative art the distinction is tolerably plain. Individual expressiveness emerges along with what the Greek calls “ imitation,” beginning above architecture and the non-repre- sentative lesser arts, with naturalistic as opposed to geometrical decoration, and becoming more and more concrete throughout the higher kinds of plastic art and painting in which the ab- stract conditions of reasonable expressiveness only continue to assert themselves as the principle of unity and composition. But Greek theory was necessarily unable to enrich its aesthetic analysis by the deeper spiritual content which a complete explanation of concrete beauty would have demanded, and therefore the Greek mind merely accepted the problem as one of “ imitation,” of somehow or other getting at reality, and supplemented its abstract aesthetic principle which it was unable to deepen by the immature ethical and metaphysical reflections which we have considered. And these, as we saw, have at least the merit of bearing witness to the perception of certain essential relations both positive and negative be- tween life and art, but do not contribute anything to strictly aesthetic investigation. „ , „ 4. I will conclude this chapter with an illus- mai to cottorete tration, drawn from modern research, of the mode Boanty. Feetmer. degree in which the abstract conditions of expression are in themselves symbolic of ideal content, and ' Cf. Phadrus^ 268 D. THE GOLDEN SECTION. 4 * are at the same time, in virtue of the abstract and universal nature of this content, related to more concrete utterance as form to substance. Assuming for the sake of argument that observation, as Fechner thinks,* bears out the idea that a certain type of rectangle is simply as a figure in space, and apart from any other known relations, more universally pleasant to the eye than any other rectangle, we seem compelled to suppose that it owes this property to some peculiar adequacy with which it embodies the general relation of part to whole — that is, to some unique symmetry or balance of its form. If it were possible to trace the alleged preference for the “golden- section ” -rectangle, which is the type in question, to some association with utility, this would make no difference to the present argument. An association which is sufficiently uni- versal to generate a preference that no one can discover to be biassed, is such as must be grounded in the nature of the object. In such a figure then we have an example of mathe- matically formal beauty. But further, many of the instances which have been examined by Fechner are rectangular picture-frames. Now here we at once come upon a possible conflict of principles. The preference for a golden-section rectangle, which depends upon its form alone, is plainly not of sufficient weight in determining the shape of a picture to counter-balance any requirements that may arise from the nature of the subject. It is not found that the same shape is thought appropriate to all easel pictures even when the shape is freely chosen ; while we know that almost any form of silrface prescribed by an architect can be utilised with success by a master of pictorial composition. But yet it must suggest itself, as a matter of pure theory, that in a rectangular picture, a striking deviation from the rectangle which has most beauty on its own merits must entail a loss of expressiveness, which is no doubt readily compensated by the gain of higher elemf.nts of content, but, if quite wantonly incurred, would in its degree be a defect. ^ Fechner, Vorschule der /Esihetik^ 190 ff. * A rectangle formed according to the golden section is a figure determined by a ratio of its sides such that the less is to the greater as the greater to the sum of the two. This ratio is roughly satisfied by 8 : 13, or 21 : 34. 42 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. I do not now propose to discuss the more subtle manifesta- tion of the same principle of unity in the composition of the picture itself. My purpose was only to give a perfectly plain example of the relation in which the most formal element of beauty, having in itself a real though scanty substantive import, stands to the concrete revelation of spiritual insight which is clothed in natural shapes. In Stothard’s picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims, for example, the shape of the canvas draws its justification from the necessities of the subject, and very obviously sacrifices the slight superficial beauty of the golden-section rectangle. Whether such a sacrifice can be compensated so as not after all to be a sacrifice is a question which will return upon us in modern aesthetic. The point which we are now endeavouring to make clear is that formal symmetry and concrete significance are not two heterogeneous elements of beauty, but are related purely as abstract and concrete. The next chapter will be devoted to tracing the advance towards a more thorough theory made by the Greek mind, at first within the outlines which have now been de- scribed, and ultimately passing beyond them. a (17 note 1). Professor Butcher has convinced me that this passage from the Physics is not here in point. But the general meaning of fUfiririKai rix^ai (Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Arty p. 121) bears out my statement. b (p. 19). See, however, Butcher, op. cit.y viii., for the moral meaning of anaprla. 1 cannot quite admit that even so interpreted “ Aristotle’s phrase will include the most signiticant of” tragic conflicts. I need only point to Professor Butcher’s observations on the Antigone. It will be enough, perhaps, for my p>oint to beg the reader to note that- Aristotle’s ideal play was the Oedipus TyrannuSy while Hegel’s, for instance, was the Antigone. c (p. 28). This phrase perhaps too nearly suggests the modern conception of representa- tive art. See Butcher, op. at.y pp. 1 22-3, on the object of aesthetic imitation according to Aristotle ; “ men in action” ; or ^^77, irddri, jrpd^eis. d (p. 31). Imitation of nature in the modern sense, roughly equivalent to Plato’s account of art in Rep. X. It has nothing to do with the meaning of Aristotle’s identical phrase, which does not apply to line art more than to industrial art. CHAPTER IV. SIGNS OF PROGRESS IN GREEK THEORY CONCERNING THE BEAUTIFUL. I. We saw in the last chapter but one that poetic art in Hellas was encountered by the earliest reflective criticism with a decided hostility, which was only the most primitive form of a misapprehension essentially involved in Hellenic thought. It is clear that Plato was alive to the existence of this critical antagonism, which his own views reproduced with a deeper significance. The object of the present chapter is to point out in their actual succession the most important changes by which the naive standpoint of Hellenic speculation upon beauty is at first modified ; paving the way for those by which, in the dawn of a later period, it is altogether transformed. The cardinal points which determined Greek theory must now be considered with reference to three antitheses, which correspond to the content of the three principles discussed in the last chapter. The antithesis of imitation and symbolism corresponds to the metaphysical principle, the antithesis of real interest and aesthetic interest to the moralistic principle, and the antithesis of abstract and concrete analysis to the aesthetic principle. Each of these antitheses expresses a contraist between the Hellenic point of view and that of later times, and therefore indicate a direction in which modification became apparent even within the classical mode of thought. By keeping in view these leading contrasts it may be possible to preserve a degree of unity in tracing the process of oiodification through the speculation of successive thinkers. The pre- 2. The later pre-Socratic philosophers may be Boentioe. mentioned with reference to the first antithesis only. We observed aunong them a hostility to imaginative art arising from a naive conception of its relation to reality ; but they also show traces of the opposite and equally one- 41 44 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC sided conception of art as allegory. The interpretation of Homer by the ascription of hidden meanings (iirovota) was a familiar phenomenon to Plato, and is ascribed by later tradi- tion to the school of Anaxagoras. At any rate the mytho- logical phraseology of Heraclitus and Empedocles obviously leads up to such a conception, although it would be unhis- torical to suppose that the Erinyes,^ or Hephaistos, Jr Strife, or Friendship were for these philosophers as they would be in similar speculation to-day, names consciously drawn from the mere analogy of a different sphere, for agencies known to be purely physical. It is plain that in the allegorical interpre- tation of the time just preceding Plato, and in writings kin- dred with allegory, such as the fable, the artificial myth, and the scientific epos, the crude idea of imitation was supple- mented by a reaction which itself fell into the opposite and hardly less crude extreme. For in allegory the reflective meaning and the sensuous embodiment are not fused into one, but are clearly distinguished, running in separate though parallel lines. Thus the allegorical expositions of Homer seem to have been directed to break the force of moralistic criticism, by reducing the content of the poems to a bald scheme of abstract truths. Allegory, therefore, is in its essence defective symbolism — symbolism in which form and content are at bottom indifferent to one another — and its presence whether in criticism or in production at this early period reveals a discontent with the limits of “ imitation ” together with an incapacity to grasp the nature of concrete symbolism. caa the 3* Assuming that the Socrates of the Memora- inTiBiua De bUia may be treated, comparatively speaking, as Imitated 7 i • ■'r the historical Socrates, 1 notice two points of interest in his recorded ideas. a. It is exceedingly remarkable with reference to the first antithesis that he directly raises * the question “ Whether the invisible can be imitated.” The invisible to which he refers consists of mental moods, such as good and bad temper, and these, he is reported to have argued in discussion with Parrha- sinus, can be rendered by means of the expression of the face. * “ If the sun leaves his path, the Erinyes, allies of justice, will find him out. ’’-—Heraclitus, Ritter and Pr. no. 37. * Xen., Memor., iii. 10. SOCRATIS. 45 and more particularly through the look of the eyes. It is also remarkable that he lays stress on the artistic expression of vitality.* Although these suggestions do not profoundly modify the idea of imitative representation — for common usage would quite allow that anger is through its effects an object of sense-perception, yet the formulation “ Is the unseen imitable ? ” is at least suggestive ; and the demand for “ expression " in pictorial art is an important anticipation of later theory. The view of Socrates as to the capacity of painting is not quite in agreement with that of Aristotle, which it appears to have suggested by opposition. It may be added that the necessity for something more than sheer imitation is recognised by him through the crude conception of gathering together, from different originals, elements of beauty which nowhere exist in combination. In so early a period this idea is interesting, because it shows the consciousness that art needs in some way to bring a deeper insight to bear upon reality than untrained perception can supply. As a formal theory in later times it is simply tedious, being obviously no more than the first uncriticised shape of a very simple postulate, fsthetto and A The attitude of Socrates to the question. Seal Interest << beautiful thing as such a real interest ? ” that is, an interest relative to a practical or to an appetitive purpose, is so far as we know uncritical, although the course of his thought may remind us of a feature in that of Kant. He refused, so we are told, to contemplate the possibility that beauty could exist except as relative to a purpose. To us, such relativity appears to destroy the aesthetic point of view, and the conception of beauty. It is well however to re- member how naturally the postulate of reasonable system, which is the fundamental aesthetic requirement, takes shape in the conception of teleological relativity. The addition suggested by Kant when he describes beauty as the character of adaptation to a purpose without relation to an actual purpose is probably a very fair gloss on the immature idea of relative beauty. Both Plato and Aristotle are in advance of the Socratic standpoint in this respect. * The way in which these qualities are led up to in Xen., l.c., as something beyond o-v/t/icrpi'a and leaves no doubt in my mind that Plotinus, in whom the sequence of terms is exactly the same, was much indebted to this passage in the Memorabilia. 46 HISTORY OF iBSTHETlC. 4. It is hard to elicit much of definite historical fact from the traditions that refer to early Pytha- goreanism. It seems certain, however, on the authority of Aristotle that philosophers known as Pythagoreans had pur- sued mathematical investigations with success, but had inter- preted some of their results after the manner of mysticism. It is also definitely asserted that the numerical relations of the musical scale were discovered by them, a. With reference to the antithesis between ^ imitation and symbolism, the habit of a mystical interpretation of numerical relations and also the habit of refer- ring musical effects to mathematical relations, opened a wide pathway of escape from the idea of common sensuous reality as ultimate standard and original.* More especially, such investigations no doubt influenced the view on which Plato and Aristotle, we shall find, were substantially agreed as to the pre-eminent moral import of music. According to Aristotle ® the Pythagoreans actually treated number as the original of which things were “ imitations,” an expression which Plato superseded, so Aristotle continues, by the phrase “ participation ” ; meaning that they exist by par- ticipation in abstractions and not as representations of them. This shows us how boldly the term “ imitation ” was capable of being applied, but also that Plato was inclined on the whole to introduce a somewhat greater strictness into the usage. Passing over the second antithesis /S, which does not concern us here, we may notice that — ooacrate 7* The genesis of aesthetic criticism, through a *®**3^***- real hope and conviction that the principle of unity could be applied in the analysis of shape, rhythm, melo- dies, organic existences, was due in great measure to the pros- pect opened up by the progress of geometrical science and of elementary mathematical acoustics. The idea that a musical effect or symmetrical figure could be shown to owe its charm to a mathematical relation, having itself, probably, a further significance more or less justifiably imputed to it, plainly ani- mated the scientific imagination much as the physical theory of light and sound has animated it in the present day. Plato’s® account of the science of “harmony,” analogous, I ^ See Timaus, p. 80. * Metaph., A. 5 and 6. * Republ., vii. 530 ff. SYMBOLISM IN PLATO. 47 presume, rather to acoustics than to counterpoint, and of the different classes of students who pursue it, some of them experimentalists ^d some mathematicians, shows that the attempt at detailed analysis of musical effect was no new thing, and his own suggestions were obviously encouraged by the consciousness of a scientific movement in the direction. However mystic might be its accessory ideas, still the enthu- siastic conviction that form and number underlie the structure of the universe imparted a comprehensiveness and audacity to critical analysis such as, on a very different plane of actual knowledge, characterises modem speculation. It must be borne in mind that the 5th and 4th centuries b.c. were a period of genuine advance in mathematical theory. The life of Euclid falls about the close of the 4th century, and the knowledge embodied in his Elements of Geometry was grow- ing up, partly by the researches of the “ Pythagoreans,” through the previous two hundred years. We may mention in this context the tradition that a canon, or rule of abstract proportions, was embodied by Polycleites in his statue of the Doryphoros.* Enquiry into proportional relations is one thing, the substitution of an abstract rule for creative percep- tion in art is another. It is not at all impossible however that the two were confused, as is constantly the case in the theory of practical men, and that thus the analysis of an abstraction was made to do duty for the analytic criticism of concrete expressiveness. 5. In Plato we see both the completed system of Greek theory concerning art, and, side by side with this, the conceptions that were destined to break it down. Symbolism When we found that the idea of symbolism, that is, of the embodiment of invisible realities in sensuous form, is conspicuous by its absence from Plato’s ex- plicit theory of representative art, our conclusion ought to have excited some surprise. For, in the growing rebellion against a natural monism, fostered by abstract science on the one hand, and by abstract mysticism on the otjjer, Plato appeared as the prophet of a dualism between nature and intelligence, or sense or spirit, which might be said to have had the effect of turning the whole perceptible universe into a symbol of ideas. It is difficult not to suppose that later European ^ Overbeck, Schriftquellen, 953 ff. 48 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. theology, to which fine art became so profoundly related, has its ultimate source in the great simile of the Republic by which the Sun and its light are conceived as the offspring and sym- bol of the absolute good and its manifestation or utterance. And in a somewhat different arrangement of the same scheme, the only-begotten universe of the Timesus, the god perceptible to sense, who is the image of the ultimate reason, also sug- gests ideas which were destined to become for centuries the principal content of symbolic imagination. But by Plato himself this connection was not established. Images and imagination, for him, rank below nature and science. What he cares about, as every sympathetic student must feel, is reality at first-hand ; and the generalization that representative art is reality at second-hand is still fresh and serious in his mind. Thus the conceptions from which a new symbolic art was one day to spring do not coalesce with his theory of the rank and aim of artistic creation. This need not be less true even if the Platonic myths are genuine works of poetic imagination. No one doubts that the great art of Hellas in fact contained a symbolic element ,* but our inquiry deals mainly with the conscious theory of it, and on this the artistic creations of the theorist himself throw little more light than any other works which might be known to him. But although the myths are by no means pure allegories, they are rather allegorical than symbolic. They are not exactly fables like those of vEsop, nor apologues like Prodicus’ Choice of Herakles, but they resemble these stories in being subservient to conveying abstract ideas, the pictorial embodiment of which is expressly admitted to be indifferent. “ A man of sense ought not to say,’ the Platonic Socrates concludes the great myth of the Phaedo, “ nor will I be too confident, that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true." Poetry, in the strict sense, cannot distinguish so coolly between the content and the form. Thus we can hardly admit that the myths are genuine examples of symbolic art ; we should rather look for such art as this in the simple human drama of the dialogues, in their pathos, humour, and portraiture. But this, as has been im- plied, throws no real light on Plato’s theory of beauty. It is important however to note that Plato was familiar PROGRESS IN PLATO. 49 with the idea of allegorical interpretation.' But this, as his good sense rejected such a method of arriving at the meaning of great poets, seems rather to have indisposed him towards a spiritual interpretation of art than to have recommended such a conception to his mind. On the other hand we may observe in Plato a few distinct theoretical deviations from the doctrine which restricts repre- sentative art to the imitation of commonplace reality. „ , „ * i. Enough was said, in the last chapter, of the general analysis ol formal beauty as embodying the principle of unity. This analysis was applicable, in Plato’s mind, to all arts and crafts as well as to natural objects, and he actually employs the word “imitation” to express their embodiment of spiritual ideas in sensuous form.* Musical ii- In the case of music this is especially re- syrnDouanL markable to a modern reader, and when we are told® that certain rhythms, and, apparently, certain melodies, are “ imitations ” of certain types of life or temper, we feel that the limit between the image and the .symbol is over- stepped. No doubt it was only very simple music which had for him this distinct expressive capacity, and it is not difficult to trace in his discussion a transition from the idea of repro- ducing in narrative such tunes or songs as a man of a certain character would willingly use, i.e. an Imitation in pari materia, of sound by sound, to the consideration of the tune or rhythm reproduced in its direct relation to the mood of the man whose feelings it expresses. We shall see that Aristotle goes still further in the same direction. Beauty which worth remembering that outside la more Plato’s definite theory of art the beautiful is princi- than formal p^|jy. spoken of as the manifestation of intelligence,* and the idea of poetic inspiration which earlier literature had possessed, and which the criticism of imitation had perhaps unduly thrust aside, is adopted by him with varying degrees of irony,* but always, probably, with a ^und psychological insight that the creative and critical genius are distinct, and that the apprehension of truth which belong to creative imagi nation is other than that which proceeds by methodic reason. * Republic, 378 D. * Republic, iii. 401. * Republic, iii. 400 B and D. < Cratylus, 416. ^ Phcedrus, 245 A; Laws, 719 C; Meno, 99 D. E 50 HISTORY OF iESTHETlC. But these suggestions were not reconciled with the general explanation of representative art, and the poet and artist rank in Plato’s eyes many degrees^ below the true lover of beauty, who is on a level with the philosopher. Thus it has even been maintained that for Plato fine art falls outside the pro- vince of the beautiful.’* We have already seen under what limitations this assertion is true. He recognised that in fact the expression of ideal contents was especially noticeable in the works of man, but his theory of representation prevented him from founding upon this observation any definite notion of the beautiful as revealed more especially in art. jS. Estimation of beauty according to a practical Interest interest is as we saw equally unaesthetic, whether the interest is moral or sensuous. Not that pleasure, in the ordinary sense of the term, as descriptive of pleasant feeling, indicates an unaesthetic interest ; for in saying that we mean a thing to afford pleasure we only say that we mean it to please ; and the question now raised is more concrete than this, and the answer depends upon whether the pleasure is expected to arise from the sheer expressive effect of the aesthetic appearance, or from purposes or associations con- nected with the existence of the real objects of which that appearance reminds us. Therefore we must not look for Plato’s attitude towards true aesthetic interest in the contrast which he too frequently draws between art which has for its object to give pleasure, and art which might have for its object to produce moral im- provement. Although, as we saiw in the last chapter,® the demand of early criticism for moral elevation in art implies a sound judgment on the substantive relation of beauty to life, yet when we are estimating the progress of aesthetic theory proper, we must not recognise moral improvement as an aesthetic interest any more than the pleasures of vice. It is rather within the region of pleasurable presentation, as con- ceived by Plato, and in the contrast between pure and impure modes and conditions of such presentation, that we must look for something corresponding to the antithesis which we have in mind. But this contrast again is apt to be presented in a way which does not directly answer our question. Pure pleasures. * Phadrus, 348 E. * Schasler, i. 89. ” Cf. also Nettleship in HdUnka. BEAUTY AND rLBASURE. 5 * such as according to Plato arise from true beauty, are free, no doubt, from selfish interest in the bad sense of the words ; thus much is clear ; but whether they are distinct from the plea- surable side of the nobler real affections and volitions is often by no means clear. Impure pleasures, again, are full of sen- suous, and even of painful or uneasy interest ; but whether they are separated from the pleasures of true beauty because they are relative to real desires (as morality also is), or be- cause qua pleasures they are disfigured by uneasiness, or only in so far as they are conceived to be of an immoral type — this is by no means plain. We may take as extreme examples of Plato’s leanings in these two directions, first the above-quoted passage from the Philebus'- relating to the beauty of form or unity ; and secondly that in the Gorgias dealing with musical and tragic art, through an ironical comparison of them with the routine — denied to be an art — of cookery.* For instance, “ and to what does their solemn sister [sister of choric and dithyrambic poetry, musical execution has also been mentioned], the won- drous muse of tragedy, devote herself? Is all her aim and desire only to give pleasure to the spectators, or does she fight against and refuse to speak of their pleasant vices, and willingly proclaim in word and song truths welcome and unwelcome ? Which is her character ? “ There can be no doubt that Tragedy has her face turned towards pleasure and gratification. “ And is not that the sort of thing which we were just now describing as flattery ? ’ In the Pkilebus it is assumed, and in the Gorgias implicitly denied, that pleasure is at least an essential element of the characteristic impression for which beauty ought to be valued. But in the pa.ssage in which this is assumed, the pleasure in question is strictly limited with reference: i. To the kind of sense-perception which can give rise to it — the per- ceptions of eye and ear only, with a doubtful inclusion, on a lower level, of the sense of smell; and, ii. 'J'o the cases in which these sense-perceptions can give rise to the characteristic pleasures of formal beauty ; cases that are free from the un- easiness of desire, and, as above explained, are distinguished by their symbolic character. ‘ See p. 33, iupra. • Gorgias, pp. 501, 502. 5 ^ HISTORY Of /ESTHETIC. The demarcation between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic senses, strongly insisted on in the Hippias Major^ which, if spurious, is interesting as showing a growth of definite ideas on this point, is a fair indication that the boundary between aesthetic and non-aesthetic interest is coming into view. Negatively, the “ theoretic senses ” are not connected with material consumption of the thing perceived, and positively, they and no others, with the doubtful exception of touch and muscular sense, have the capacity for the recognition of struc- tural totality, the first condition, as we have seen, of the ex- pressiveness in which beauty consists. The doubtful inclusion of smell most emphatically illustrates the genesis of the dis- tinction in Plato’s mind. If we judge by “ purity ” in Plato’s peculiar meaning, viz. as freedom from the intermittent un- easiness of desire, the pleasures of smell are pure ; if we judge by purity in the sense of significant unity or concentrated energy as revealed in the expressive character of a presenta- tion,* the pleasures of smell are not pure, but are as a rule mere occurrences in the way of pleasurable sensation. If then, in the passage from the Gorgias referred to, the fault ascribed to art were nothing more than that what it aims at and generates is pleasure, we should find a discrepancy between the two passages. But the aim ascribed and con- demned in the Gorgias is pleasure as stick, which means, as Plato seems rightly to insist with all his force, pleasure at any price and in anything.* “ Cookery,” he says (it is cookery with which poetry and music are being ironically compared, as equally forms of " flattery,” i.e. mere provision of the pleasant) “ in attending upon pleasure never regards either the nature or reason of that pleasure to which she devotes her- nor ever considers nor calculates anything.” This com- parison shows that the satisfaction of real desire is not far from Plato’s mind as the ground to be alleged against the nobleness of the concrete arts. It is exceedingly suggestive that in order to carry out this comparison he proposes to divest poetry of its poetic form, and consider simply its matter, that is, to change it from art into something else. But he does not name this ground, and passes on to the old ^ Hipp, Afajor^ 297-8. * See Ruskin’s Modern Painters.^ vol. ii., on Purity. * Gor^as^ 501 A., Jowett. THE LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL. S3 antithesis of pleasure-giving as an aim, contrasted with moral improvement, so that he himself actually approves as the pur- pose of art not an aesthetic but a real, t.e. a moral interest. The conclusion must be that Plato has a clear view of aesthetic as distinct from real interest only in so far as he recog- nises a peculiar satisfaction attending the very abstract mani- festations of purely formal beauty. In those concrete forms of representation which we think the higher arts, he was unable to distinguish the pleasure of expressiveness from the practical interest of morality, which he desired to see predominant, and from the pleasure of realistic suggestion which he utterly condemned. This view of Plato’s meaning is not, in my judgment, to be very seriously impugned on the ground of the noble account, several times repeated in the dialogues, of beauty as the object of educated love.‘ The question is whether the feeling for beauty so described is to be understood as a real enthusiasm for an idea, or even for a person sublimed into an idea, — an enthusiasm such as demands the reality or realization of its object — or as an ideal delight in a perfectly concrete sensuous appearance which charms as an appearance only. A pure affec- tion for a good and attractive friend, or an enthusiasm for the cause of order or of knowledge, is likely to be attended by refined perceptions, but it is not in itself the same thing as a feeling for beauty. Again, a delight in the expressive force of perfectly concrete fancies or appearances independent of the real practical existence of the objects corresponding to them, can hardly indeed exist except in a mind of large and noble purposes, but is not in itself an affection for any actual person, or enthusiasm for any actual cause. If Plato’s “ beauty ” is an abstract purpose or principle, his “ love of beauty ” is a refined enthusiasm for real purposes or principles ; if his “ beauty ” is a value or import felt in the world of sense- perception when taken simply as expressive and not as a means to any end, then, and then only, his love of beauty is an aesthetic delight not concerned with the real existence of its objects. It is plain that both these elements enter into the Platonic love-philosophy, and that they are not as a rule distinguished. The former belongs to abstract and the latter, to concrete ^ Symposium; Rep.^ iii. ; Phcedrus. 54 HISTORY OF iESTHEllC. idealism ; for if beauty is out of the sensuous world, it is un- distinguishable from the object of will and knowledge ; while if it is in the sensuous world, it belongs to a perfectly definite sphere of appreciative perception. Plato’s thought undoubt* edly alternated between these two extremes. What we have to bear in mind is that moral purity in the purpose of art or beauty does not constitute aesthetic purity, though moral impurity in the purpose of art or beauty does constitute aesthetic impurity. It is further worth remarking that Plato had observed the special connection between imagination and emotion,^ and was not wholly unaware that free utterance of passion* might bring relief and calm, and again that the representative arts might be contrasted with the practical arts as play® with earnest. This latter conception, invested with profound import in modern times by the genius of Schiller, is in Plato a natural accompaniment of the view which makes the repre- sentation an inferior species of the reality, as when we say contemptuously of a dilettante that he is only playing at work. Yet this, like so much of the groundplan of Plato’s thought, was full of possibilities which only needed a larger experience of spiritual needs and achievements to become realities. Concrete 7- The last observation calls upon us to notice critidsme. immense substantive contribution made by Plato to the material for a true concrete criticism. For real advance in the theory of a great subject it is less important that a thinker’s verdicts should be unimpeachable than that he should have gathered into a connected whole the right kind of experience and treated it in a way that suggests the most important issues. Plato has sketched the fabric of aesthetic experience on a coherent plan, which subsequent history has proved to be in accordance with the nature of the phenomena. He left to those who came after him the definite conception that there is a group of representative or imaginative arts consisting in chief of sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, with the addition of architecture and its auxiliary handicrafts, which are united with one another at least by a common difference from the merely useful productive trades, and the value of which presents a problem to those who care for the highest * Rep., X., 606 D. * Laws, 790. * Laws, 8S9. DATA AS LEFT BY PLATO. 55 concerns of life. The chief points of view under which Plato attempted to penetrate the significance of these phenomena have already been set forth. It only remains to state that in spite of the abstract limitations within which he worked the mass of experience to which he called attention was such as to lay a sound foundation for a more concrete criticism than his own. He gaye a raison dHre to the distinction of epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry, not in itself new, by analysis ‘ turning on their respective degrees of dramatic personifica- tion ; he pointed out that a tragedy is an organic whole,^ and not a string of speeches expressive of various morals ; he made an attempt of which the import is largely lost to us, but the suggestion is still valuable, to determine the ethical and symbolic affinities of metres melodies and other features* of the vocal and instrumental music of his day ; he pointed out, though primarily as a proof of remoteness from reality, that the painter’s third dimension^ is ideal and not actual ; he insisted, as we have seen, on a symbolic value, though only of a very abstract and simple kind, as shared by all the formative handicrafts including architecture, with the more elaborate representative arts, and explained it more especially in the case of geometrical figures and simple tones and colours. The mere distinction, which was mentioned just above, of the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic senses, bequeathed to later philosophy a problem of extreme interest and difficulty, while the place assigned to beauty in education bears witness to the philosopher’s practical feeling for it as the sensuous repre- sentative of reason, and has recently revived as one of the profoundest guiding ideas of modern life. Thus Plato’s philosophic instinct enabled him to gather and organize an experience which suggested far more than was included in his abstract aesthetic theory, and to set the pro- blems which only a more concrete criticism could solve. 6. It is needless to enter at length into the twice- AiiBtoua general relation in which Aristotle stood to Hellenic life and thought. It there never was a greater intelligence, certainly no intelligence had ever a nobler opportunity. In the sphere of realized beauty with which we are here concerned, not only had the greatest works already ^ Rep., i-iii. 3. * Phxdrus, 268, * Rep., i-iii. ; Titnteus, 80 B. * ReP-, x. 56 HISTORY OF /BSTHETIC. been produced, and attained complete recognition,* but an after-prime had subsequently set in, the nature of which could not fail to stimulate theoretical reflection. And for this re- flection the material was not only complete, but had been in great part organized by the thought of Plato. Thus to the greatest of originators there succeeded the greatest of investi- gators. _ ^ a. First, then, in conformity with our previous method, we are to inquire how far Aristotle may have modified the essential Hellenic idea that only such reality as pleases in ordinary experience is that by the reproduction of which fine art hopes to please ; how far, in other words, the differentia “ imitative,” which he does not discard from the definition of art, retains for him its natural meaning of copying something which is such that it can be copied. Does “ imitation ” in Aristotle lean at all to “ symbolism ’’ ? Baiecuon of It is important that we should notice what Ptaenomena. aesthetic phenomena chiefly attracted his atten- tion. In i^isthetic, as in other branches of philosophy, Aristotle is the earliest writer to leave us a separate treatise. But its title of Poetic confines its immediate subject matter to literature, and within literature to the art of invention or composition, usually though not necessarily in verse, of which three principal kinds, Epic, Tragedy, and Comedy, formed the heads of the discussion. Music is alluded to only as an incident of poetry. The arts of acting and of the rhapsode are referred to as essentially outside the arts of drama and epic respec- tively ; so that although these classes of poetry are considered throughout with reference to the feelings of an audience or of spectators, yet we are not wrong in saying that they are essentially treated as literature. Lyrical poetry has as yet no single name, and is not recognised as a species. Formative art, including Architecture and the lesser decorative crafts, fall outside the scope of the treatise, although painting is alluded to more than once by way of illustration. Observations upon music and painting occur in other writings ; but there is no systematic inquiry into the pleasure arising from these arts. Aristotle’s treatment of the subject is therefore not co-extensive * As in the law of Lycurgus providing that statues of the three great tragedians should be erected, and that correct MSS. of their dramas should be prepared and preserved. IMITATION INNATE. 57 with the philosophy of Fine Art. How far such a philosophy can be gathered from him will appear as we proceed. But if his selection of phenomena is baulking to our curiosity, which would have welcomed his criticism of the Parthenon pediment-sculpture or of the Phigaleian frieze, it is eminently favourable to advance in aesthetic science. For it is most particularly t^e poetry of Hellas that we cannot possibly reconcile with the formal aesthetic theory natural to Greek thought, which finds some justification in its monu- mental sculpture and its temple architecture. In technical language, an inquiry into Greek epic, tragedy, and comedy, must at least include elements belonging to the aesthetic theory of the sublime and the ugly ; and it would be impos- sible to penetrate far into these distinctively modern provinces of aesthetic without throwing off the subjection of art to that which pleases in everyday perception. The treatment of comedy in the Poetic, of which the details are unhappily lost, was therefore in principle a most important extension of Plato’s reference to the drama. ii. In conformity with the choice of subject mat- TbB Vgiy. remark * that the laughable is a subdivi- sion of the ugly — the laughable being the subject of comedy, and therefore falling within fine art and its essential quality the beautiful, though I do not affirm that Aristotle was aware of this implied paradox. And more consciously suggestive, in the same direction, is the observation, frequently and empha- tically repeated, and extended to the whole sphere of “ imita- tive ” art, that an imitation is often agreeable though the thing imitated or copied is disagreeable. I quote a charac- teristic passage in this sense, with the attempt at explanation which the phenomenon elicits.^ “It seems that the origin of poetry is entirely due to two causes, both of them consisting in natural tendencies. First, imitation is innate in human beings, as we see from childhood upward, and man differs from other animals in being so ^iven to imitation, and his earliest acquisition <)f knowledge is by means of imitation ; and pleasure in imitation too is innate in all men. There is evidence of this in the facts ; for we take pleasure in looking at the most carefully executed pictures of things which in themselves we dislike to look at, such as ^ Poetic^ 5, I. Poetic^ 4. 5 « HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. the forms of the most ignoble animals, or of corpses. And secondly," there is this cause, that not only men of science enjoy the exercise of apprehension, but the rest of mankind enjoy it too ; only their capacity for it is limited. So this is why they enjoy seeing the likenesses of things, because it is an incident of seeing them that they apprehend and infer what each thing is, as for instance ‘ This is he ; ’ for if the spectator has never seen the thing before it will not be the likeness [lit. ‘ imitation ’] which will cause the pleasure, but the execution or the colour or some such reason.” The second “ cause ” is meant to be an explanation of the first, as the following passage shows.* “ Since the use of the intelligence, and the feeling of wonder, are both of them pleasant, it necessarily follows that things are pleasant which are of the class of mimetic art, such as painting and statuary and poetry [it is most remarkable in connection with what will be said below, that music is here omitted] and everything which is well imitated, even when the object itself is not pleasant. For it is not the object which gives the pleasure, but infer- ence takes place that ‘ This is that,' so that an exercise of the intelligence is brought about.” The phenomenon thus insisted on opens up vistas that lead to romantic art and modern theory. How far did Aristotle appreciate its significance ? We are here face to face with the recurring problem set by the apparent simplicity of Aristotle’s thought. We shall see below that a rough and ready interpretation of his terms, by merely converting them into their current equivalents, will certainly at times lead us astray. Yet where the text gives no hint of subtlety, it can hardly be right to import it. Literally understood, the above passages account for the pleasure which we take in represen- tations of the unpleasant, by our enjoyment of the intellectual act and achievement involved in simply recognising the object portrayed. And of the existence of such a pleasure there is no doubt whatever.* But it is plain that by merely pressing upon the meaning of the term fiavdaveiv, “ to apprehend,” and avWo'yt- ^eaOai, “ to infer,” we might introduce such a conception as that of entering with full appreciation into the idea, perhaps even into * 1371 b, 4. • See Fn Lippo Lippi : “ The monks closed in a circle and praised loud,” etc. IDEAL IN ARISTOTLE. 59 the mood, embodied in the artistic representation. In this case we should have reached an explanation to which modern theory has little to add. Aristotle’s omission to refer to mood or emotion makes in my judgment strongly for the former alter- native ; and it is almost impossible, so it seems at least to the modern reader, to over-estimate the naivete of Greek criticism. But though in the present case I believe the less pregnant interpretation to be nearer the truth, we shall see below that we are skating on thin ice when we prefer the more superficial explanation of Aristotle. It should be needless to remind the reader that no Greek term with all its content and associations can by any possibility find a precise equivalent in any English term ; and we are not entitled to argue strictly from any single rendering, but we must consider how much ground a simple term may have covered before the necessity for more subtle phrases was perceived. However this may be, it is clear that the fascination of ugli- ness in representative art was a newly observed phenomenon in contradiction with the simple assumption that the repre- sentation affects us as does the corresponding reality. Not the content of the likeness, but something, whatever it might be, involved in the fact of its being a likeness at all, was thus suggested to be the secret of its attraction. Poetry iii- When we read in the Poetics'^ that “poetry* Phuosoptaic. {g more philosophical (or scientific) and more serious than history ” we are apt to imagine ourselves in a modern atmosphere ; and certainly the remark shows a recog- nition of the ideal in art quite foreign to Plato. Yet when we observe that this principle is introduced as an inference from the postulate of unity in the plot or action of a drama, that this single and self-complete action is more or less contrasted with the portrayal of human individuality, and that the “ scientific " element of poetry lies in its typical generality, we are obliged to doubt whether the idealisation thus acknow- ledged is more akin to the formal limitations or to the positive greatness of Greek drama. If Aristotle. >as the sequel of the above passage appears to indicate, really preferred on this ground the enfeebled later comedy of types and manners * to the pregnant Aristophanic comedy of humour and portrait- satire, his ideas are far less kindred to ours than his language. » Poet., 9, 3. • See Poet., 5, 3, with reference to Crates. 6o HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. It will be necessary to recur to this point when we come to consider his attitude towards concrete characterisation ; at present it is enough to note how clearly he enunciates the principle that representation is- not to be wholly fettered by given reality. uiuioai iv. It will be remembered that the Xenophontic sjmboiiBm. Socrates discussed the possibility of a presenta- tion of the unseen by formative art, and instanced the indica- tion of mental moods by look and feature. In Plato all art is regarded as capable of being thus significant, but attention is drawn more especially to the expressive capacities of music and rhythm.* In Aristotle we find that the presentation of mental or moral moods is in the strict sense ascribed only to music and poetry, to the explicit exclusion of the relation between formative art* and' mental emotions. For these, ac- cording to Aristotle, are in pictorial art only indicated through external symptoms, such as gesture and complexion, which do not constitute in themselves any resemblance to the mental feelings. But musical tunes, and words accompanied by music, “contain in likenesses [lit ‘imitations’] of moral moods.” Such expressions certainly seem to convey an in- tentional exclusion of the view which Socrates suggested, and an intentional restriction of that adopted by Plato. “ Imi- tation ” is thus not merely extended over but confined to the expressive relation, of whatever kind, by which feeling passes directly into rhythm and melody. Compare with this the very significant suggestion in his jottings of problems for inquiry, “ Why does what is heard alone of the objects of sense possess emotional import for even a tune without word? has it ; but colour [as such,* apart from indirect portrayal by its means], and smell and taste have none.” Then is imitation at last freed from “ likeness ” to a sensuous reality, and have we here, in essence, the romantic conception of music as a direct embodiment of spiritual emotion ? I hardly think so. Aristotle’s central proof that music directly * Jie/., ii. 400 B. ® Pol., 1340 ; cf. Laws, 654-5. * Prohl., 919 b, 26. 8ia tC to aKovorov fiovov €)(ti r)6oi rStv ahrOtfrotv. The simple phrase <x« is a good example of Aristotle’s curtness. Our ren- dering of this phrase determines our whole ideas of his aesthetic. * The strictness of this reference to colour has an affinity with Kant. The tnith of the opinion expressed in the text is at least doubtful. NATURE AND ART. 6i contains the essence of emotion is that in practice it produces emotion, particular tunes giving rise, it would seem, to par- ticular forms of excitement,* just as the music od the dance or the march or the hymn .reproduces certain elementary feelings and active tendencies almost with the certain operation of a drug. The movement of the music, I suspect he meant, when contrasting it with the indirect expression of painting, is the actual movement * of the mind or impulses which arises when the music is heard. So far then from “ imitation” being here refined into the aesthetic idea of symbolism, it might even be doubted whether what it describes is an aesthetic effect at all, if, by an aesthetic effect, we mean not merely response to a stimulus but pleaisure in an expression. But Aristotle loves to work upwards from physical fact to its ideal import ; and we shall probably be near the truth if we say that, starting from the fact of involuntary response to musical stimulus, he accepted an analogical kinship between moral emotion and musical expression such as Plato had already insisted on, and that therefore he did, as we should certainly judge at first sight, admit a symbolic element' into his idea of “imitative” representation, while excluding from it the simple case of copying by formative art. Art corroctiTe V. Finally it may be observed that there is at of Nature, sight a Striking resemblance in the analogy which Aristotle saw between Art and Nature,* to some post- Kantian speculations. But for our present purpose it must be borne in mind that though Nature is in both schemes likened to an inferior art, yet in Aristotle the art which makes good the imperfections of Nature is industrial f as opposed to the copyist art which reproduces her creations. There is here no hint whatever that the art which represents is entitled, in modern phrase, “ to liberate the real import of appearances ” * from the falsities of commonplace reality. Our conclusion then must be that Aristotle was driven to stretch the idea of imitation, but that he did not reject it in favour of the idea of symbolism. Given ^reality was still for him the standard, but he saw the difference which treatment produced in it — he saw that it must be idealised. This is a position fairly in accordance with the apparent actual process ^ Pol.f l.c. cont. * Probl.f l.c. * 4 >u<r., 198. * See Introd. to Hegel’s Esthetic, Eng. Trans., p. 15. 63 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. of art, but ultimately inconsistent with itself, and unstable. For, if given reality is the standard, what is to indicate the direction in which it is to be idealised ? The true answer, “a deeper reality,” is excluded ex hypotkesi so long as given reality is the standard. The anaesthetic answer, “ morality is the guide,” is terribly obvious, and I cannot think that Aristotle wholly escaped its influence.* The answer of abstract aesthetic, “Unity and symmetry are the rules,” is the confusion of funda- mental abstract conditions of art with its concrete content, and suggests to us ideal trees that are no trees in particular, and ideal dramas whose chief concern is to observe the unities. How far in detail Aristotle escaped this confusion, towards which the limitations of his aesthetic tended to force him, we shall endeavour to determine below. In the meantime it seems that his conception Of fine art in its relation to nature* may be fairly summed up as the idealising imitation of given reality. AMthettc /8. We are now to ask how far Aristotle escapes Interest, from the moralistic limitation natural to Hel- lenic theory, by recognising the demarcation of the peculiar pleasure afforded by beauty from all satisfaction attaching to practical relations with reality, whether moral, non-moral, or immoral. Beauty, virtue i- When we turn to his general utterances on and Pleasure, subject of beauty, we find distinctions obviously of the nature in question ; but, after Aristotle’s manner, each element of the distinction is only insisted on for the purpose of the moment, so that what is clear in one passage seems obscured in another. Where it is maintained that mathematics * can treat of attributes that belong to beauty, the beautiful is distinguished from the good ; where the mean life ’ is contrasted with the noble life, beauty is distinguished from expediency, but is identified with a form of the good; where sexual preference* is being contrasted with aesthetic selection, real beauty is dis- tinguished from beauty which only has reference to desire. Thus the boundary between the beautiful and the merely pleasant is more firmly maintained than that between the beau- tiful and the moral ; and we are disappointed to find in the context of the most attractive definition of beauty given by * See ch. iii, above. • Metaph., 1078. * Rhet, 1390. * Probl., 896 b. BEAUTY AND EDUCATION. 03 Aristotle — “ the beautiful ‘ is that good which is pleasant be- cause it is good ” — that virtue is explicitly included under the head of the beautiful. Nevertheless it is probably thus classi- fied not on moralizing grounds, but as possessing a certain immediate splendour analogous to the beauty of sense.* We see, however, that the differentia which should confine the beautiful to the province of sense and imagination is conspicu- ous by its absence, except in eis far as it is implied in the amount of attention devoted to “ imitative ’’ art. There can be little doubt that Aristotle, if led to define beauty in all its relations at once, would have traced its fron- tier satisfactorily. But he has not, in fact, left us a systematic treatment of the general subject, and does not seem to have conceived such a treatment in his own mind. ii. It has been suggested ® that Aristotle’s inter- interest Jn beauty was mainly educational. It is true that the chief account which he gives of music and drawing occurs in the educational sections of the Politics. But we must remember that to introduce aesthetic interest into educa- tion is not the same as to introduce educational interest into aesthetic. The former Aristotle certainly did at least in one instance ; how far he did the latter may be best discussed in connection with his celebrated definition of tragedy. The noble saying which is Aristotle’s criticism upon the received estimate of drawing as an element in education, is a proof that he regarded education as incomplete without an attempt to develop true aesthetic perception. Drawing is to be taught, he suggests,* not merely to impart skill in estima- ting the commercial value of articles, but because it makes the pupils good observers of the beauty of objects. How far a similar aesthetic interest is indicated in the discussion of the aims with which music is to be taught depends largely on our interpretation of the definition of tragedy, which is echoed in part of the educational inquiry. It is plain, indeed, that Aris- totle values both music and drama, not only as an educationist for their effect on character, but as a mayi of the world for their recreative and social function. The question is as to the precise nature of the higher recreation as understood by him. ‘ Rhet., 1366. ® See above on Beautiful Soul, p. 37. » Ulrici, in Muller, a, 181 * RoL, 1338. HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. •n..*.. It will be well now to consider the question of before us in connection with the only account of a Tragedy, form of this higher recreation which has been pre- served to us at all completely as it came from Aristotle’s hand. mtniTiMii from “• The celebrated definition of Tragedy in the Axtatoue. Poetics may, I believe, be fairly paraphrased as follows. “ T ragedy is a representation [lit. imitation] of an action noble and complete in itself, and of appreciable magnitude, in language of special fascination, using different kinds of utterance in the different parts, given through per- formers and not by means of narration, and producing, by (the stimulation of) pity and fear, the alleviating discharge of emotions of that nature." Of these defining terms, “noble” distinguishes the subject-matter which tragedy shares with epic from that, viz. forms of the inferior or ugly, which comedy shares with satire. “ Complete in itself” refers to the demand for organic unity of structure, having beginning, middle and end, which is the only form of unity strictly demanded by Aristotle. Unity of time is alluded to only in the remark that the action of tragedy is confined as a rule to one day or little more ; unity of place is not mentioned. “ Of appreciable magnitude ” refers to the necessity that a beautiful thing should be readily apprehended in its parts and also as a whole. “ Language of special fascination ” refers to the employment of rhythm and melody ; “ with different kinds of utterance ” to the difference between iambic declamation and choric song ; “ given through performers ” distinguishes drama from epic ; it is noticeable, however, that Aristotle admits that a drama can be judged of by reading. The remaining portion of the definition has been the subject of much controversy, which will never perhaps be finally laid to rest. Space forbids me to defend at length the rendering which I have adopted with full conviction.* I merely mention, on account of its surpas- sing historical interest, the fact that Lessing, in harmony with the spirit “ of his century, not yet set free by Goethe,” * ren- dered the term Kudupan, which I have paraphrased as “ allevia- ting discharge,” by the equivalent “ purification,” and held it to indicate a conversion of passion or emotion in general into ^ Resting on Bernays’ Zivei Ahhandlungen uher d, Arhtotelhche Tkeorie d. Drama, Berlin, 1880 (first published 1857), which cannot be too strongly recommended for its suggestiveness and lucidity. ^ Bernays, l.c. AKISTOTLL ON TRAGEDY. 65 virtuous dispositions ; that Goethe rightly protested on general grounds against such an interpretation, but proposed in its place one quite incompatible with Aristotle’s Greek ; and that Hegel, ‘ while not directly challenging the authenticity of the current expression, “ purification of the passions,” interprets it and restricts it in a way that makes it a vehicle for the most pregnant meaning that could possibly be ascribed to Aristotle. The definite explanation of the term Kadapmf, which Aris- totle had given in the Poetics, has not been preserved. The rendering here adopted is chiefly though not solely founded on a passage in the Politics^ treating of certain effects of music, from which it appears that “ purification " (or rather “purga- tion ”) does not fall within the educational province, and that it is a special term indicating an action upon persons predisposed to pity and terror (which all are in some degree) analogous to that by which orgiastic strains produce first excitement and then restoration to tranquillity in persons of ecstatic temperament. It is by a similar operation of music (theatrical music is explicitly mentioned) that all persons, in so far as they are predisposed to pity and fear, may be brought to undergo “ a kind of purga- tion and relief accompanied by pleasure.” The analogy is medical, and indicates a relief from the passions rather than a purification of them. It may be added to this necessarily slight account of our materials for estimating the aim of tragedy as conceived by Aristotle, that he regarded the laws of the beautiful as neces- sarily applicable to the tragic treatment of action ; ® that the psychological connection of pity and fear as laid down in the Rhetoric suggests to us the conception of an idealised terror, acting through human sympathy, as the essence of the tragic emotion referred to ; that its aim, or at least an element in its aim, was pleasure, not however all pleasure, but the pleasure* arising from pity and fear by means of artistic presentation (lit. by means of imitation), but that the “ purgative ” function of good music — and, we may presume, of good poetry — though plainly separate from educa- tion or edification on the one hand, does also appear to be distinguished on the other hand from the sheer entertainment or recreation (avairavo-tv) to be provided by inferior music for the more vulgar kind of audience.® » ^ sth ., 3, 531. * Pol., 1340 a, 1342 a. » Poetic, 7, 4. ■* Poetic, 14, 3. • Politics, J341. r 66 HISTORY OF iESTHETlC. Esttmate of 111! In contrasting Plato and Aristotle with refer- *•“***• ence to their estimates of the secondary effects of tragedy, we are apt to forget how closely they agree with regard to its primary psychical operation. The spectator at a play ' indulges his emotions, chiefly those of pity, or fear, without the restraints of practical life, and flnds a plea- sure in such indulgence, and this pleasure, Plato at least maintains, the tragedian is ready to purchase at any price, shrinking from no source of emotional excitement. The difference begins after this point. Plato thinks only how emotion is intensified by habit and contagion ; Aristotle applies another principle, not wholly alien to Plato, but in this context a practically new departure. The principle is in general, that emotion may be relieved, discharged or mitigated by mere indulgence. This is not the same as to say with both Plato and Aristotle in their educational theory that emotion may be disciplined by being excited under moralising influences. But whether Aristotle meant the full opposite of this conception, that is, to accept as the basis of art the fact of psychical excitement pure and simple, without considering the relation to life of the content active in the excitement, is the question which we now have to approach. The problem is complementary to that of Aristotle’s psychological explanation of enjoyment in the portrayal of the unpleasant. There the question was, “ Does he refer to the pleasure of bare recognition, or to the satisfaction of profound appreciation?" Here the question is, “Does he refer to the pleasure of any thrilling emotion ending in an agreeable languor, or to the delight of pregnant conflicts of feeling issuing in a calm which is reasonable as well as patho- logical ? Does he, in short, take account of ideal content as well as of psychical sensibility ?” It is the same question in another form when we ask whether for him as for Plato the pleasure which is the aim of tragedy is pleasure at any price. It appears to me that we have here a case of the hetero- geneous definition which we saw* * to be so tempting and so fallacious. It is clear that the pleasurable thrill of the com- monest passion — anger,® for example — was a fact observed * -Rep., X. 606. cf. Phadrus, 268. ■ Chap. i. * Rhetoric, 1370 b, la ARISTOTLE ON TRAGEDY. 67 by Aristotle, and influencing him in his aesthetic theory. It is clear that the pathological phenomena which furnished the analogy for his conception of alleviating discharge are akin as well to the narcotic languor which succeeds the morbid excite- ment aroused by a thoroughly vicious play- or novel, as to the tranquillity of assuaged emotion which is brought about by reading the Antigone or the CE dipus at Colonus. But it is no less clear that he did not mean to identify the vulgar or morbid affections with the operation of tragic art. The object of tragedy is pleasure, but only the pleasure of tragedy, and the pleasure of tragedy is a form of enjoyment strictly limited by the conditions which were explained in its definition. Now if we ask, how this limitation, this picking and choosing within given reality, can be justified, we shall find no real answer short of the complete liberation of art, not only from the standard of common reality, but from the kindred aim of thrilling the common sensibility. “ Idealisation” would be then a simple consequence of the demand for the most pregnant expression, and the mere discharge of feeling would be recognised as an extreme no more proper to art than the opposite extreme of moral purification. Aristotle, not being prepared to break away in principle from the pre- sentation of common reality, could not reconcile these aims, all of which he saw to be essential. They are therefore simply thrown together to limit each other as best they may. Plea- sure and emotion are necessary, but not at the expense of nobleness ; nobleness is necessary, but not at the expense of the power to stimulate emotion. The emphasis which he rightly laid on utterance and in- telligence did not lead him to the idea that the delight of these factors of art was no mere psychical accident, but was the manifestation of joy in self-expression, the ultimate root and ground of aesthetic pleasure ; and therefore when we are asked whether Aristotle recognised aesthetic ^s apart from real interest (either moral or hedonistic) we are thrown into per- plexity. Emotional utterance, rational ^content, a free deail- ing with reality, all these he recognises as elements of art. But instead of combining them as “ the emotional utterance of rational content in forms freely drawn from reality,” he in- clines to separate them as “ the pleasure of utterance,” “ the formal beauty of ideal content,” “ the moral emendation of reality,” so that perhaps we ought to reply that he recognises 68 HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. all the elements of aesthetic interest, but that he tends to speak of them in terms that indicate their origin in common reality rather than their transfiguration in artistic enjoyment. But at any rate the stress laid on the enjoyment of expression and self-utterance, although in contents and emotions which as such are painful, is a step substantially incompatible with the relation of allegiance to given reality, and has kinship with the modern idea of sport or simulated action as the dis- charge of superfluous vitality, as well as with the conception of expression for expression’s sake. Concrete 7 We have seen that with Aristotle the stan- orittdBm. (jard of commonplace reality began to yield before the observed necessities of idealisation, and that fine art in its highest form was pronounced by him to centre in emotional self-utterance. We are now to ask, in terms of our third antithesis, how far in detail his critical insight broke down the fot'mal abstractness of Greek aesthetic, and took the shape of analytic inquiry into concrete expressiveness and characterisation. mstoiyaiid Aristotle even loses, as compared with Plato, Biements something of that kind of concreteness which arises o rama. 3^ various object matter. He left, it would appear, no aesthetic recognition of architecture and the minor crafts, while even sculpture and painting, though referred to in the discussion of particular problems, are held to be on a lower level of expressive capacity than music and poetry. It is only in virtue of such references, and of his retention of the com- mon name “ mimetic ” for fine art in general, that we are entitled to draw conclusions from his treatment of music and poetry to anything like a general aesthetic theory. But yet the first attempt to analyse the structure and evolu- tion of a form of art, and to deduce its origin from fundamen- tal tendencies in human nature, marks an epoch in aesthetic reflection, which has always been most vital when most histori- cal. For history cannot but involve some recognition that what men do expresses what they are, and the most elementary analysis of structure pioneers a way by which reflection can gain access to its object. That “imitation”* or representation is an innate tendency in man ; that from the first it has taken in poetry two co- * Fottie, 4 , PARTS OF A TRAGEDY. 69 ordinate forms, so that the Iliad or Odyssey is a forerunner of tragedy just as the Margites of comedy ; that both species of drama developed through many changes out of perfor- mances in which poet and actor were one, but that comedy was later than tragedy in arriving at completion, and that the iambic metre was adopted in the course of this development from the very nature of the case, being nearest of all metres to common speech ; this. - with the well-known details as to the number of the actors, and with the opinion that tragedy had at length reached a final because adequate form, is the SMbstance of Aristotle’s brief history of the drama. Nature, he says, was its cause, through the mimetic impulse ; and the diverging tendencies of man’s disposition, towards the noble and the ignoble respectively, have been its guides. Even from this imperfect summary the reader will feel that the great naturalist breathes vitality into his subject, and has grasped the unity of human nature in its most splendid self- manifestations. The importance of the function which he assigned to artistic imagination, though he acknowledged no such faculty by name, may be illustrated by the technical terms employed by him in the analysis of tragedy. It is not necessary to suppose that they were all originated by himself. Omitting the quantitative division of tragedy into Pro- logue, Parodos, etc., although even these show the sense of a necessary order in the work of art, we should notice the six ‘ qualitative elements, three forming the object represented, viz. fable or plot, character or moral temperament, intel- lectual reflection ; two constituting the means of representation, viz. linguistic expression and music ; and one being the mode of representation, viz. the mise-en-sc^ne, including to a Greek the masks of the performers. Not all of these elements need special remark. The “ Fable,” or “ Composition of the incidents,” is the life of the play, and the great test of the poet.* All the above-mentioned postulates of unity refer to it. It m%y be “simple” or “ complex,” and in every case contains a transition from happiness to misfortune, or the reverse, and, if “ complex,” will contain, as the instruments of this transition, “ surprising reversals” or “recognitions.” The fable 'will also contain ' Poet., 6, 7. * Cf. Phado, 61 B ; (7/. Bernays, p. 186. 70 HISTORY or ESTHETIC. the “ Pathos,” which is “ a disastrous or painful incident.” The external reference of “ pathos ” as here first mentioned is worth noticing. The construction of the fable and its parts is further analysed with a view to securing its conformity to the con- ditions of tragic emotion. The nature and content assigned to such emotion in Aristotle’s theory has already been dis- cussed. Human life was to be the interest ; but what human life we find a more difficult question. Every tragedy, finally, may be divided into a “ knot ” or entanglement (which might also be called the plot, if that term is not appropriated to the “ fable ” or argument), and a dinoHment or solution. It will at once be seen how many ideal requirements are imposed by this analysis on the art which “ imitates ” reality — how it is directed to the task of concentrating the confused panorama of life into a single, coherent, striking, and natural picture. It is worth observing, as a touch of distinctness in advance of Plato, that the mise-en-sclne is dismissed as not belonging to the poet’s art, though fascinating in itself. It is further worth pointing out that Aristotle is disposed in several ways to defend poetic licence against a too literal criticism, observing that interpretation must recognise a certain play of language,* th^ what is an error judged by a special science is not, unless wanton, necessarily an error judged by poetic purpose, and that an action in a play must be criticised according to fitness as well as according to merit. Plot and Char- ii. I have reserved for discussion by itself a actor-drawing:, very important relation between two of the six “ elements ” of tragedy. What place does character-drawing, or characterisation, hold with reference to plot ? I start, as in other cases, with the rough and ready notion of Aristotle’s meaning, which we obtain by simply accepting current renderings eis literal. In the present case I may state it by a quotation from Mr. Mahaffy : * “Of these various elements [the six above-mentioned], Aristotle justly considers the plot as by far the most impor- tant, observing that recent tragedians had succeeded, by paying attention to this point, without any character-drawing ” [ethos]. The term “ ethos,” which 1 have rendered above ‘ Poet., 35. * History of Greek Literature^ vol. ii. p. 409. PLOT AND CHARACTER. 7 * by “moral temperament," is here translated “character” in the sense apparently in which character is understood to-day to be the object of artistic portraiture in Shakespeare or Thackeray. The view thus ascribed to Aristotle is in startling an- tagonism with our ideas. Pure plot-interest without character is for us on a level with the interest of a puzzle and its answer, and therefore in art, with the interest of a story whose char- acters are mere ciphers manoeuvred through strange and intricate combinations. True, we demand a well-constructed plot ; but we think no art worthy of the name in which the action fails to issue necessarily from human character. Yet Aristotle’s language sounds strong in the opposite sense. I reproduce the whole passage on which our judgment must mainly depemd, retaining the actual word “ ethos ’’ in place of any rendering. I believe that I am right in saying that the normal application of ethos in Plato and Aristotle is to types of character as described by a single term with a moral connotation, such as “ courage," “ temperance,” “ gentleness,” and their opposites. After enumerating the six qualitative elements of tragedy, Aristotle continues : * “ The most important of these elements is the composition of the incidents [the plot or fable]. For . tragedy is a repre- sentation [imitation] not of men and women, but of action and life. Now good and ill fortune attend upon action, and man’s purpose is always some kind of activity, not a quality ; but what ethos determines are the qualities of persons, while action makes them happy or unfortunate. And so poets do not represent persons acting in order to display their ethos, but they take it in as an accessory to action. Thus the incidents and the fable are the purpose of tragedy ; and in everything the purpose is the most important Moreover there cannot be a tragedy without action, but there can be without ethos ; most of the later tragedies are without it, and among poets in general it is rare. For they are like ^euxis compared with Polygnotus among painters : Polygnotus is a good painter of ethos, while the art of Zeuxis indicates nothing of the kind. [Could Aristotle mean that Zeuxis was unable to paint char- acteristic likenesses ?] Again, if you string together speeches ‘ Pott., 6. 7 * HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. that have ethos,* and are excellent in expression and reflec- tions, yet you will not attain the aim of tragedy nearly so well as with a play inferior in these respects, but having a fable (or plot) and composition of incidents. It is just as in painting ; to put on the most beautiful colours at random would not pro- duce as much pleasure as to draw a portrait in chalk. Nay, more ; the most fascinating elements of tragedy, the surprises and recognitions, belong to the fable. And it is a further proof of our view, that beginners in poetry attain completeness in expression and ethe [plural of ethos], before they are capable of composing the march of incidents ; almost all the earliest poets are instances of this. So the fable is the mainspring and, so to say, the life of the tragedy, and the ethe are secondary ; for the tragedy is a representation of an action and of agents only for the sake of the action.” With this should be compared the passage translated in chapter iii.* It will be observed that if the term ethos here corresponds to character or character-drawing in the modern sense, it re- sults that in the comparison with painting characterisation is contrasted with portraiture and assimilated to non-pictorial colour effect ; which latter, however, must rather be an extreme simile to show how far removed this ethos is from what we call character. For according to the Problemata mere colour as such has no expressive capacity, not even for mood or temper (ethos), much less, therefore, I presume for individual character. Further, “ ethos ” determines “ of what sort ” * a person is ; and this “ sort ” means primarily whether he is good or bad.* Speeches which have no ethos are such as display no relation positive or negative to a purpose ; * it is the kind of purpose, i.e. primarily, whether it is good or bad, that marks the ethos of the speaker. Again, the idea of stringing together “ ethical ” speeches is clearly I think a reminiscence of Plato’s distinction between emotional harangues, which are beginners’ work,® and composition, which is the test of the master. The fact that “ intellectual reflections ” are an element distinct from ethos testifies to the same thing, for in every true character- portrait the vein of intellect is included. Therefore it appears to me that ethos in Aristotle’s aesthetic 1 Cf. Phcedrus, 268. * p 20, sup. * Poet., ib. * Quot. above, chap. iii. p. 20. * Poet. ib. • Phadr-is, 268. Aristotle’s real view. 73 meant not individual character, the concrete living creation at once mysterious and intelligible, that we look for in modern art, but something more typical and generic, not without a moral reference, as we say “ good ” or “ bad ” character. And so if we look at what is demanded of ethos in tragedy,* we find four requirements : first, it must be good ; then appro- priate to the person ; then natural ; then even or consistent ; and if the person is to be of inconsistent temper, then consis- tently inconsistent. No doubt these latter requirements show some awakening to the importance of characterisation ; but it is to be noted that they are all secondary to goodness. The possibility that this demand for goodness may be a confused attempt to require that tolerableness or beauty which splendid characterisation can bestow on the worst character, does not entitle us to interpret Aristotle’s postulate in a way which he nowhere suggests. Thus it occurs to us that the antithesis which seems indi- cated by a literal rendering of Aristotle, may not be that which he had in mind. He may not have been contrasting the plot, as a mere puzzle and solution, with the portrayal of individual human character, but he may rather have intended to oppose the man as revealed in action, or in speech which contributes to advance the march of incident, to monologue or conver- sation simply intended to emphasize this or that type of dis- position in the interlocutors. The illustration from painting confirms this suggestion. The plot seems to be compared to a portrait, not indeed of persons as such, but, we must suppose, of action and life ; that is, we may venture to suggest, of persons in action according to the necessities of their cha- racter. A mere plot-puzzle is not a portrait of life. And yet the stress laid by Aristotle upon the incidents of good and ill fortune ought perhaps tc make us feel that the child-like inte- rest in the mere event, the triumph or failure of a human being, not because he has great character, but because our attention is drawn to him, may have been more natural to the Greek than to us. , If, however, we were to press home the suggestion which has forced itself upon us, we should find that instead of the most infantile of all views of the drama we were attributing to Aristotle the most profound. We should no longer imagine ^ Poetic ^ 15. 74 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC that Aristotle rated ingenious plot-construction first (for apart from character it could not be more than ingenious), and held the revelation of the mind and heart to be secondary and superfluous ; we should understand him/ to be contrasting the revelation of human lives in their necessary movement and collision, produced by character in action, with moralising argument or with the mere display of sentiment. The tragedians after Euripides are to us mere names ; and whether Euripides himself, who died before Sophocles, was to Aristotle an instance of ancient or modern style, is hard to conjecture, I do not think it possible to elucidate the problem before us by reference to literary history. It could hardly be suggested that the tendency to characterisation diminished in the later tragedians, although some among the creations of .^schylus have in this respect never been surpassed. But it may well have been the case that such a play as the Prometheus Bound, depending for its attraction wholly on a picture of superhuman courage and endurance, and hardly possessing any element of a plot, did not seem to the aesthetic philosopher to be in the strictest sense a drama. I suggest this as an example of a play that has ethos, and has not dra- matic composition. It has been doubted whether our great modern dramatic analyst has displayed genuine capacity to construct a play that will march. If this doubt is justified. Browning may be cited as an illustration of the antithesis between stringing together monologues that display the good and bad in character, and composing a dramatic action. I believe, however, that neither of the conceptions which I have thus contrasted would express Aristotle’s exact position, which lies somewhere between them. He must, we are driven to conclude, have accepted that element of character which is the moving spring of plot as a part of the human situation and conditions to be portrayed. But his failing to insist upon this element in its subjective aspect shows that his point of view was still on the whole Hellenic, and was more simple and more external than that which takesthe humanmind to be the essence in all drama And we still are at one with him in holding the mere exhibition of temperament in its moral aspects, when not genuinely elicited by the necessities of the story, to be drama* tically superfluous. Thus we cannot allege that Aristotle explicitly breaks the fetters of Greek aisthetic, by throwing his interest into the free ARISTdTLE’s ADVANCE. 75 representation of spiritual powers as embodied in great cha- racters and their collision. His chief care is for organic unity and dramatic composition. Only as he presses this unity into detail after detail, it becomes more and more concrete and pregnant ; and we almost incline to believe that in substance, though certainly not in form, he identifies the object of artistic representation not with the common shows of life, but with spiritual forces in their deepest reality. It has been maintained that throughout his aesthetic discussion Aristotle is covertly criticising Plato.* This is a needlessly disagreeable way of observing that the later writer’s mind is wholly permeated with ideas drawn from the earlier. It is by no single origination that the advance was made which I have endeavoured to depict. It consisted, first, in Aristotle’s unhesitating recognition of a supreme value in the whole sphere of beauty — an attitude natural to the successor who inherits at one blow the concep- tions which their author elaborated gradually and without realising their entire significance — and secondly, in the definite ascription of important functions and properties to representa- tive art all along the boundary-line where it faces common- place reality. Thus throughout the three antitheses by which I have attempted to gauge the flowing tide of Greek aesthetic speculation, the reality of common experience shows in Aris- totle a tendency to lose its controlling position ; for, metaphy- sically, art, and we must suppose all formal beauty in its degree, is credited with the power to represent what is unseen, and the deeper truth ; ethically, the interest of beauty is at least not wholly identified either with moral or again with sensuous aims ; and aesthetically there is revealed in the beau- tiful, under pressure of an appreciative analysis, an ideal unity of structure such as to display the events of life in their essen- tial connection, which is in some degree acknowledged to have its roots in human character. But, on the other hand, not only does Aristotle retain the technical term “ imitative,” as the differ^tia of the art that realises beauty, qualifying it by no scientific -expression that recognises the idealisation which in practice he admits, but, what is more imf>ortant, he has no distinct answer to the ques- tion what principle prescribes the direction which, this idealisa- * Schasler, i. 149-153. 76 HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. tion is to take. To say “ the direction of beauty ” is tau- tology ; to say “the direction of symmetry and unity” is dangerously formal and empty ; to say “ the direction of morality ” is simply false. All these directions are hinted at by him, and no deeper theory is suggestedf Therefore we cannot pronounce that he abandoned the essential limitations of Hellenic theory concerning the beautiful. a (p. 5^. Tlic rendering in the text is erroneous ; it should run “the cause of this again is, that not only ” . The second cause of poetry is not the love of learning but the instinct for rhythm, mentioned by Aristotle in a later paragraph. My observations on the significance of this love of learning must now be held to refer to the deeper meaning which Aristotle secs in man’s enjoyment of imitations. ^ (P- 59 )* O*' paragraph cf. Butcher, Aristotle^s Theory of Art 149-50. f (p. 61). A reader might be puzzled by this discussion compared with Butcher, op. cit.y p. 124, where symbolism is sharply denied to Aristotle. The discrepancy is only verbal. Professor Butcher is speaking in Aristotle’^ language, while I am following modern usage. And the two, as Professor Butcher in part explains on pp. 128-9, almost exactly opposed ; see p. 60 of this work. For Aristotle, the symbol is less than a “ likeness ” ; for the modern it is more. (p. 61). I hope that, as is pretty certain. Professor Butcher is right and I am wrong on this point. Aristotle’s Theory of Arty p. 152: “ The artist in his mimic world carries for- ward this movement (of organic nature toward, ‘ the better ’) ” to a more perfect com- pletion.” e (p. 62). See chap. iii. notes c and d (p. 42). f (p. 74). See Butcher, op. cit.y 330 ff. with the reff. to Mr. R. P. Hardie’s article in Mindy vol. iv. no. 15. I think I may say that Professor Butcher and Mr. Plardie endorse my conclusion on the whole matter of plot in relation to character, though both of them are against me on the point of regarding as “ typical and generic.” My term was perhaps ill chosen. But, following Air. Hardie's view that has to mean expression o^ character in speech, as well as character, I do still think that Aristotle lays a double requirement on ^^05, and not -nerely the natural one that it shall be human and correlative to xpa^ts. I think he wants it to be emphasized as “good.” All naive criticism does this, and Aristotle is partly naive, fjdo^ to him oscillates mainly between the poles of good and bad. It does not equally accent the whole capacity of human nature. ^ (p. 76). See note d above and Butcher’s chapter on “ Imitation as an ^F^sthetic Term.” The question is what sort of idealization or expression of the universal is suggested by Aristotle’s theory. I adhere on the whole to the view of the text, while admitting that Aristotle starts along a road where it is difficult precisely to measure his advance. CHAPTER V. ALEXANDRIAN AND GRECO-ROMAN CULTURE TO THE REIGN OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT. Character of In the hundred and fifty years that ended with the Period, jjjg death of Aristotle there had lived and worked in the city of Athens, containing a population about equal to that of Glasgow, three of the greatest philosophers, four of the greatest poets, and more than one of the greatest formative artists, that the world has ever seen. If we further represent to ourselves the speculative, poetic, and plastic activity of Hellas in general throughout or before the same period, taking as a background to the whole picture the Iliad and Odyssey, which imply at least two poets of the very highest rank, we shall be in some degree prepared to estimate the change that came over the civilized world during the fourth century before Christ. It is only the simple truth if we say that no speculative thinker of at all the same calibre as Aristotle existed again before the time of Descartes, no formative artist singly ^ on a level with Praxiteles before the time of Giotto, no poet having the strictly poetic greatness of the Athenian dramatists before the time of Dante. And if we were resolved to take account of nothing but the supreme moments of the aesthetic consciousness, and the clearest crystallizations of the thought that reflects upon it, we should at this point be forced to the salto mortale of i, 6 oo years to Dante, or 2,000 to Burke or Lessing. But such a procedure could only be justified if it were the fact, or if it were con- ceivable that after this immense interval, which would then be inexplicable, the thread of reflection and i^roduction had been taken up again from the point at which it was dropped. Now the fact is, on the contrary, that in this interval the cpsthetic consciousness had traversed an enormous distance ^ The emphasis to be laid below on mediaeval architecture will explain thif reservation. ff HISTORY OF ESTHETIC 7 « from its Hellenic origin, partly as latent in the general move- ment of mind and history, but partly also in its own shape as art and literature and critical or speculative reflection upon beauty. We must therefore attempt in this and the following chapter to set up landmarks, however few and distant from each other, by which the appreciation of the beautiful may be followed through the complex movement which carried the old world forward into the new. For six centuries at least after the death of Alexander the civilization which had its roots in Hellas was the civilization of the world. If we ask at what date it ceased to be so, a definite reply cannot be given. New principles emerge in history and obtain supremacy, gradually, and not at one blow. Before Justinian closed the schools of Athens in 529 a.d., the art of the new world had been growing for at least two hun- dred years, and had already attained its first climax in the Church of the Heavenly Wisdom at Constantinople. Nor did Proclus in the fifth century carry the philosophic tradition of a thousand years far beyond the point to which Plotinus had brought it in the third. I shall therefore limit myself in the present chapter to the period between the death of Alexander in 323 b.c. and the inauguration of Constantinople as the seat of government for the Roman empire in 330 a. d. It has been well observed that the earliest known building which displays the principle of modern architecture undisguised by traditional Hellenic forms — the palace of Diocletian at Spalato — was erected^ within a few years of the latter all-important change. And the historian of philosophy may add, that Plotinus, who died in the latter half of the third century a.ix, had, as the last great Hellenic thinker, broken the bonds of ancient theory concern- ing the beautiful, while the later writer Augustine, at the close of the fourth, was to announce the distinctively modern principle of a certainty implied in intellectual doubt.* And although the Greek poetry of the Anthology revealed a last after-prime of classical genius in the reign of Justinian, and ^ In 3x3 A.D. See William Morris, Lecture on the History of Pattern- Designings in a volume of lectures by himself, Mr. Poynter and others Published by Macmillan, 1882. • Augustine, de Trinitate, x. 14. See Rigg, Pico d. Mirandoia, Introd. 79 THE “DECADENCE." lived, or at least existed until the dawn of the Renaissance, yet the true prime of this minor poetic art had passed away with Meleager before the Christian era. We are accustomed to regard the Alexandrian and Greco- Roman ages as a time of decadence in culture. They form about one-half of that mysterious transition during which the whole of Europe produced no work of individual genius that could compare with those which had been common things throughout the creative period in Athens and in Ionia. Our judgment to this effect has acquired peculiar cissociations from the portrayal of a world lying in wickedness and impotent for intellectual or moral good, which Christian advocates have impressed upon the popular mind. But in the first place, those who take a natural view of history must assume that every apparent decadence has operative within it the causes which lead to the subsequent advance — in so far as that advance is not due to nations outside the range of the de- cadence. And in the second place, as soon as we consider with impartial attention the phenomena of Alexandrian and Greco- Roman art and letters, we see that we have before us a movement of extraordinary width and variety, which at every turn reveals new elements of feeling and a new spirit akin to modern humanism. To define the tendencies of this period, in contrast, for instance, with those of the Periclean age of Athens, is a task which strongly impresses us with the defects of abstract language. We had a foretaste of the same difficulty in attempting to explain what Aristotle meant by ethos in poetic art as indicating a quality in whidh the more recent writers were deficient. The antithesis between Ethos and Pathos, which is currently read into these observations of Aristotle, is hardly justified by his language. But assuming that it fairly represents what is implied in his expressions, it still remains very hard to interpret. The portrayal of “ char- acter" belongs in one sense more to .^Eschylus than to Menander, in another sense to Menander more than to ./Eschylus : and if “ Pathos ” is equivalent to “a sensation ” in the modern literary meaning of the term, and it is much nearer to this than to what we call pathos — it is hard to imagine that the later drama had more of it than the Aga- memnon or the CEdipus King. And thus again if we try to lay down that culture in the 8o HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. period now before us is rather “ subjective,” and in the earlier time of a more “ objective ” cast, we are met by the apparent contradiction that in the later time philosophy becomes in great part less speculative and more inclined to physical con- ceptions, poetry is more devoted to natural beauty and to the presentation of daily life, formative art takes among other directions that of landscape, of portraiture, of anatomical study, while literary criticism develops a sense of history and an elaborate discrimination of individual styles. Or if we attempt to apply the antithesis of social and in- dividual interest, and to treat the peculiarities of the later period as depending upon the self-concentration of the indi- vidual’s powers in his own life instead of their devotion to a community, we are again face to face with the paradox that in the world of art and letters we meet with no such com- manding individualities in the later age as in the earlier, while we everywhere find evidences in it of a growing sensitive- ness, unknown before, to the idea of humanity as a whole. Thus it might seem that the application of the above antitheses might just as well be reversed. Is it possible, then, at all to describe in general language that distinction between the two periods which we can very readily feel ? The fact is that we are here dealing on a small scale with the contrast between the antique and the modern spirit. And the reason why no simple antithesis appears to meet the case is that whereas the antique spirit is single, the modern is divided. Tested, therefore, by the extreme of any abstract tendency, the modern spirit overpasses the antique ; only the completeness and thoroughness, whether intellectual and imaginative or political and social, that marks the highest perfection of genius as of life, is for this very reason difficult of attainment in a “ modern ” period, and was not in fact attained during the six centuries of transition which we are now preparing to consider. Thus we can understand how the culture of the “ decadence ” was at once more “ objective" and more “ subjective,” more individualistic yet more alive to humanity as a whole, more ascetic and yet more romantic, than that of the preceding age. It will be worth while to adduce in a brief summary the principal aspects of this many-sided movement, rather in order to recall to the reader what he already knows, with a view to a certain interpretation, than with the idea of ade- NEW TENDENCIES. 8i quately describing a huge complex of phenomena which the meanest of text-books would not attempt to deal with in the space at my command. We will speak first of the tone and temper of life evinced by the philosophies of the time, which must be treated for this purpose as mere data in moral and intellectual history, and of the actual sense of beauty revealed in the art and letters of the so-called decadence. And, secondly, we will bring down the history of aesthetic criticism and speculation, if our frag- mentary treatment of this period deserves the name of history, to the close of origin il Greek speculation in Plotinus. General PbUo. I- The extreme tendencies which have been sophy end Art. alluded to sometimes displayed themselves — as extremes will meet — within a single group of productions or of opinions ; but as a rule were dispersed among different schools of thought or different modes of art. pwioaophy “• It would be unfair to say of Plato and Aris- totle, and notoriously untrue to say of Socrates, that their philosophy was not essentially concerned with practice. Yet even for Socrates, and still more for his great successors, practice was bound up with social devotion, with civic solidarity, and with a positive faith in reason. But when Hellenic city-politics had lost their importance, and the organic philosophy of Hellas had broken up like the empire of Alex- ander, a new temper supervened in which, it may be observed in passing, some clues of thought were picked up again which had been thrust aside for the moment by the centralized^ speculation of Imperial Athens. The Heraclitean and the Cynic found a new development in the' Stoic, the Atomist and the Cyrenaic in the follower of Epicurus, the Eleatic, and the Megarian, and in some degree Socrates himself, in the negative s Scepticism. In the new political conditions all correspondence between the outer and the inner reason, between social organization and the social will, was for the time destroyed. And thus the individual man was thrown back upon himself ; upon his private needs and interests on the one hand, and, on the peculation and practical interest of the earlier ^ Cf. Mr. Mackail’s remarks. Greek Antholo^y\ p. 289, on the interruption of epigrammatic production during the bloom of Penclean Athens. See below, p. 86. G 8s HISTORY OF iBSTHBTIC Other hand, upon his non-political relations with friends or with humanity. The new recognition of these latter forms of fraternity is a typical example of the modern breadth and audacity with which sentiments and ideas were now pushed to their extremes. But such general sentiments of community were not then, and probably never can be, enough to absorb and direct a life’s energies. Therefore the problem of practice emerged in a new perspective and proportion. The question is no longer “ What great end can be attained in a world which corresponds to the needs of the rational will?” but, “ How can the individual live decently and not unhappily iri a world which is indifferent and may be hostile ? ” In moments of despair Plato ^ himself anticipates this inquiry, the theoretical relations of which are at once evident when we observe that the founders of Scepticism, of Stoicism, and of Epicureanism were all living at the same time towards the close of the fourth century before Christ, and that in popularity and in- fluence, the two latter distinctively ethical schools completely dwarfed the critical and positivist successors of Plato and Aristotle, and assumed the magnitude and importance of religious persuasions not co-extensive with any political or tribal group — the first considerable phenomena of the kind known to the Western world. By the side of this new personal ethic, which the Stoic based on the feeling of retisonableness, and the Epicurean on reasonableness of feeling, there was both in these and other schools a positive and naturalistic tendency of reflection. Theophrastus in the chair of Aristotle treated largely of plants and metals ; and, also, following a descriptive ten- dency already apparent in the Nicomachean Ethics, wrote on morals in such a way that his account of “character” was extracted and preserved for its own sake. Strato, again, the successor of Theophrastus, substituted the conception of a blind nature for that of God, and he all but anticipated * the famous phrase of Laplace; “ Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la.” The same is true of Epicurus, and notably of his great ^ E.g. Republic^ .^26, • Cic. Acad, pr, iL 38, Negat{Siraio) opera Dcorum st uii ad fabricandum mundumn TECHNICAL TERMS. 83 follower Lucretius. Besides their persistent effort to reduce everything to matter and motion, the Epicureans seem to have made “ the first attempt to write the natural history of civilisation,”^ and especially with reference to the origin of language they introduced conceptions which are of consider- able interest to-day. Yet while thus helping to render the world intelligible, they rejected the notion which the Stoics accepted of an immanent plan or design ; and we shall have to return below to their reflection on art and beauty, which for this reason, though by no means valueless, necessarily ignored the aesthetic problem as we conceive it. A physical theory traceable to Heraclitus was developed by the Stoics, as that traceable to the Atomist was by Epicurus. But once more, in the conflict of positivist and of ethical abstractions with the scepticism that was their counter-part, we meet with a growth of technical terms and distinctions that bear a modern aspect, and have in fact descended through later writers to modern times, in which they have hitherto been far more familiar than the less formal expressions of the older classical philosophy.* This growth of technical terms is characteristic of the time, and extended, as we shall find, to aesthetic science. Thus the actual names “ Sceptic,” * “ Dogmatist,” * and “ Empiric,” begin in this period to be bandied about, as they are to-day. The Stoics desire to establish a “ criterion ” * of truth ; an attempt which is an unfailing sign of logic de- teriorating into formalism. The term occurs indeed in Plato,* but in a passing expression which alludes not to a test or touchstone of truth, but simply to the faculty or faculties, not restricted to either sense or reason, by which it is apprehended. And because of this same growing sense of division be- tween the mind and the world, we now find germs of the Conceptualist terminology which has descended through Latin writers to our own mental science. Terms which indicate a ^ Prof. Wallace’s Epicureanism, p. 1 1 7 note. Of course there is much in Plato and Aristotle to suggest problems of this nature. * We inherit many terms of great importance from Plato and Aristotle, but those which are here referred to are a larger and later crop of peculiarly modern import. * Skottikos, Aoy/iartKos, J/awctpiKOS, Kpiri^piov, * Rep., s8a A. 84 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. complete or anticipatory seizing* or comprehension by the mind, or again an inward thought or notion * defined as a mental presentation and nothing more, take the place of the ** form ” * or “ racial group,” * which were the first simple designations for facts understood in their order and essence, and not yet distinctly contrasted as thoughts with things. The famous comparison of the mind at birth to a sheet of paper prepared for writing on comes to us through the Stoics ; * and the whole simile from which such current phrases as " mental impression ’’ are derived, although originating in a carefully worded illustration employed by Aristotle,* teceived the rough mechanical form which it now bears from the Stoics as interpreted by Cicero. The Latinised terms, which may be closely rendered as “ Impulsion brought to bear from outside,” “ assent,” “ comprehensible,” “ comprehension,” ” impressing notions in the mind," “ a plain judgment {declaratio, Greek evapyua) as to the things which are seen ” (contrasted with a visual sensation attended by no such judgment) — all these modern-sounding phrases occur in a single passage in which Cicero is explaining the Stoic theory of sense-perception.* A similar relation of impact between mind and objects was assumed by the Epicureans, whose technical terms in mental science were in part the same as those of the Stoics. It may be added that many of the traditional names for grammatical cases and forms of verbs descend to us from Stoic investigations. And by the side of these philosophies, which might be called rationalistic as opposed to mysticism, though not as opposed to sensationalism, the Pythagorean vein of specula- tion maintained itself, and was reinforced after the Christian era by Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, which almost sue- ^ irpoX'qil/LSj icaraXi;i/ri9, ei/voia, Ivvorifia, <^dvTacrfia SiavoWy Diog. Z. in R. and Pr., 403. ® tSca, C1S09, yeVos. * ^apTLOv Ivtpyov ct? 6.irorfpatf>riv, Plut, dc Plac, Ph., 4, ii, R. and Pr., 339. If, as I suppose, the phrase “ tabula rasa ” represents this expression, then the qualification “ rasa ” does not lay stress so much on the blankness of the paper, as on its state of preparedness to receive impressions — a nuance which has some speculative importance. * De An/ may 424 a, 18. * Cic. Acad. Post., i. ii. R. and Pr., 398. PROGRESS IN DECADENCE. 85 ceeded in grasping the fundamental jdea of evolution ; viz. that the derivative is not necessarily the inferior. If now we return to our former attempts at definition, and repeat what is certainly true in a philosophical sense, that the culture of this age is distinguished from that which preceded it by subjectivity and individualism, we must understand that we are speaking of a complex modern subjectivity, and a relative modern individualism. It is, a subjectivity which in its sceptical divorce from metaphysic throws itself into materialistic science as one complement, if it falls into mys- tical intuitionism as another ; it is an individualism which separates itself from the narrow selfishness of the tribe or city no less than from its limited self-sacrifice, and in busying itself with the problems of reasonable pleasure is never far from the aspirations of religious asceticism. In the necessary progress of such a culture, one feature is most remarkable and most important for our present pur- pose. This is the extraordinary combination of subtlety and pedantry, of a technical language extended by widening ex- perience and an unspeculative petrifaction of the technical terms themselves, which first delights us at the advance of analysis, and then jars us by its superficiality. Ideas drawn from the great masters of philosophy become the catchwords of sectarian dogma or of rhetorical criticism ; but in this very loss of speculative fluidity they form a centre for the attach- ment of growing experience and deepening sentiment. Such an idea, for example, is the Stoics’ “ Nature,” which had for them actually less ordered metaphysical content than for Aristotle ; but yet as the banner of a cteed and the symbol of a juristic ideal became a rallying point for the new aspirations evoked by the extension of the civilised world. We shall find this curious contrast throughout the time we are dealing with. Observation, expressiveness, sentiment, and even partial theory, advance by the inertia of motion ; in an active and cultured society every writer refines somewhat upon the suggestions of his predecessors, and ^rings his own insight and conviction to bear upon the material laid before him. Obvious criticisms are propounded, meet their obvious refutation, and are re-asserted less crudely than before ; so that without leaps and bounds the literary world moves gradually onwards ; and even in the absence of that pro- founder criticism which belongs only to ages of organic 86 HISTORY OK iESTHETIC. speculation, reason slowly perfects its language, becomes familiar with important distinctions, and encounters life with a more many-sided appreciation. /8. How much was achieved in the period of ^®***y- which we speak rather by the dispersive pressure of humane culture than by depth of inspiration is especially apparent in poetic art. Hew and Latin i. The New Comedy of Athens, whose chief Comedy. representative Menander is said to have been in youth a friend of Epicurus, must have presented a very strik- ing embodiment of the complex changes which have been indicated. Bringing it together, as for our very general pur- pose we fairly may, with the comedy of Plautus and Terence a century later, from which alone we substantially know its nature, we cannot but recognise in it a kinship to our modern feeling which is wanting in Aristophanes, and even, perhaps, in the great Attic tragedians. The removal of the chorus which had unquestionably been a hindrance to realistic dramatisation, and the division into Acts and Scenes * which formed an unobtrusive framework to the play, and greatly facilitated the comprehension of an in- tricate plot, agreed well with the new matter and tone of comedy as an unpretending but ingenious representation of common life. In spite of the conventionality of their characters, the plays of Plautus and Terence speak to us with the same simple human voice as Tom Jones or Vanity Fair while the splendid genius of Aristophanes has left us hardly a touch of family incident or of homely pathos, except where, in a literary satire, he drops a word of regret for a good poet mourned by his friends. A family drama of every-day events — and such, however incomplete in its portraiture, the new comedy certainly was — touched a chord which no Greek poet had sounded, except the authors of the Iliad and Odyssey before the peculiar development of Athenian genius, and Euripides as it drew to a close. The absolute distinction between comic and tragic interest begins to fade when we have in comedy a story of actual suffering seriousl / faced, in which the facile reconciliations that seem incompatible with earnestness are ^ Due, it seems to be believed, to the Latin poets. SIGNinCANCE OF COMEDY. 87 not completely carried out. ^ It is not merely that the love intrigue or love romance (not always irregular), and the human nature of common men and women are subjects akin to those of modern literature, but that in the tone and treatment we no longer feel that hardness of naive egoism with which the Greek of tne Ajax or Ion, the “ Knights” or the “ Clouds," grasped at his own advantage and repelled every interloper as an enemy, excepting when one of two or three great interests demanded the devotion which he reserved for them alone. Mere unmotived kindness has become a greater force. The loyalty of the adventurous slave to his master is not wholly selfish, and sometimes amounts to nobility. And though this is a motive known to classical tragedy — hardly to Aristophanic comedy — yet its central place in art belongs to a time in which the servile virtues were beginning to receive the recognition which Christianity finally awarded them, and in which Terence, a Carthaginian slave, could be a leading man of letters at Rome, as Zeno, a Phoenician stranger, had founded the in- fluential Stoic school at Athens. Thus, without any great creative impulse, the dramatic “ imitation of life ” in the new comedy brings into the light a fresh region of experience, and, as it happens, one of undying interest for civilized men. And in so doing art enriches it- self with a larger insight into the beauty and goodness of common things, and with more subtle capacities of imitative presentation, thus graducilly paving the way both for a wider range of beauty and for a profounder theory of artistic utter- ance. It was a great thing for Terence to speak the word, that to a human being nothing human cdn be indifferent. ii. And besides the beginning of humane comedy. The liyiL generation of Epicurus witnessed the birth of pastoral poetry. Nothing could be more profoundly suggestive than this of the change vimich was coming over the world. That conscious self-assertion of individual feeling which has been called sentimental or romantic finds expression, still simple and healthy, in the Theocritean Idyll. ,When poetic fancy is coloured at once by the yearning of passion, the charms of the country, the sense of a beauty in art and song, and the humours ‘ So the Captbi, which is quite a serious drama of life. Aristotle’s “ No one kills any one ” (in comedy) is clearly contemptuous. Cf. close of Much Ado, “ Think not on him till to-morrow ” 88 HISTORY OF ifiSTHETIC. of a busy and splendid town, we shall not be far wrong in in- ferring that man is seeking nature because he already feels that he is parted from it. A contrast of this kind is implied in all distinctions between the ancient and the modern spirit. Theocritus, indeed, is but at the starting-point of the long and eventful course which romanticism had before it. In him there is no sense of unattainable depths and inexpressible meanings ; there is merely the trace of a new sensitiveness ‘ in the imagination which indicates the germ of a new longing in the heart. And so the fancy of Theocritus is not wholly remote from life, and the songs which he ascribes to his Sicilian peasants are such as they still sing. The romantic Faust did not yet exist ; but the classical Helena was be- ginning to have strange dreams. Within a hundred years after Theocritus the first true love romance of known litera- ture was written in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. , iii. And finally, beside the poetry of love, of art, and of rustic nature, we find m the Cireek culture ot this period the poetry of poetry. In the Garland or Anthology (“flower-gathering”) of epigrams collected by Meleager just before the Christian era, we have not only to note the beauty of his own love verses, but to consider the significance of the fact that such a gathering should be made at all, and prefaced with the beautiful dedicatory poem in which the verses selected are compared to various flowers. A subtle feeling for poetic style, and more than that, something like a sense of historical continuity, are implied in this first garland of the poets, the earliest portion of that huge Greek Anthology which did not receive its last addition till after the Divina Commedia had been written. _ _ * iv. To treat the classical Italian poets, from Lucretius to Juvenal, as merely the greatest writers of a decadence is a course that can only be justified by very carefully bearing in mind the peculiar purpose of our treatment. We are less concerned with the magnitude than with the specific quality of artistic achievement ; and while no sane man will deny that Vergil and Lucretius were great poets, yet most careful critics will admit that their strictly poetical genius, although indispensable to their greatness, did not ' For a necessary warning against exaggerating the love and observation of nature implied in pastoral poetry, see Mackail, Anthology, p. 57? THE LATIN POETS. 89 constitute its central core in the same sense as with Homer or with Sophocles. Catullus, on the other hand, though a poet through and through, may fairly be ranked as a minor poet, not merely in the quantity of his work but in the limits of his inspiration. But considered as great men, endowed with poetic genius and conscious of representing the very heart and system of the civilised world, Vergil and Lucretius are examples of the art of a decadence all the more startling because in their powerful hands this art itself has greatness thrust upon it. All the peculiarities which we have observed in the fading genius of Greece are here revealed in their most emphatic form. First among these ranks a further phase of the influence which we observed in the New Comedy, a prevailing moral earnestness and sense of duty and of humanity. Strange attributes, it will be said, by which to characterise a decadence of culture ! But as we have seen the reflective sentiment of morality was especially characteristic of this age, in which the individual was lonely in a crowd, and had to shape his life by his own common sense. And the atmosphere of serious purpose and goodwill which belongs to the Roman poets is a strong instance of the power which the natural progress of mankind possesses to place the lesser and later genius ethic- ally in advance of the greater and earlier ; while, in so far as didactic moralising or critical theology intrude into art, we have here exemplified that division of the mind against itself which marks the comparatively modern spirit of the time under discussion. Roman “ urbanity ” — the very word is sig- nificant — and Roman moralising satire, are not the natural geniality of Homer or the semi-political orthodoxy of Aristo- phanes. They are, on the contrary, the product of reflection and of a partly theoretical idea, and are thus analogous in some degree to the ethical protest and sentiment of Euri- pides, But they are more tinged, than his, with worldly wisdom, and arise not only out of a |)rolonged education through popular philosophies, but out of a mature experience of government and toleration among many creeds and civilisa- tions. And in this more humane atmosphere we are not surprised to find that the beauty of domestic love and life was at last fully revealed to poetic apprehension. Nothing, I believe, 90 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. had before been written like the “Torquatus, volo, par- vulus,”‘ or the “Carmen Nuptiale’’* of Catullus, since the parting of Hector from Andromache and his child was de- scribed in the Iliad. And Ovid’s Heroidum Epistola, though no very forcible works of genius, breathe an atmosphere of simple affection in which our modern sentiment at once feels at home. And although only Catullus, and not Horace or Ovid, can be compared to Theocritus for freshness and reality of love- romance, yet the immensely increased range and subtlety of poetic expression in that province is a fact of the first impor- tance for the history of art. Love, for the poet, is now in some cases a matter of sentiment rather than passion, a delicate and even playful feeling ; sometimes, again, a pure and elevated affection. What touch'^of human interest the /Eneid can claim, it gains from the romance of Dido ; while the variations of mood in the Lesbia poems of Catullus, with his description of Ariadne, taken together with the odes of Horace, form a gamut of emotional expression almost com- parable with that of Elizabethan song. From the lament over Lesbia’s sparrow — a lyric which goes, I should imagine, directly to the heart of every nineteenth century reader — to the praise of the lover without fear and without reproach,* whom a pure affection preserves even from bodily peril, all shades of romantic playfulness, irony, and seriousness are now commanded by poetic art. And if the playfulness of Horace appears to us, as indeed it is, a feeble thing contrasted with the passion of Sappho, yet we must not forget that there is something noble and civilised — something worthy of Shake- speare — in being able now and again to smile at the terrible love-god. Art, as we know from Goethe, and have since ascertained that we ought to have known from Aristotle, is the great liberator. 1 The whole verse runs : — “Torquatus, volo, parvulus Matris e gremio suae Porrigens teneras manua Dulce rideat ad patrem Semihiante labello.” * Containing the well known passage, beginning, “ Ut llos in septis secre- tus nascitur hortis.” * The “ Integer Vitae ” of Horace. NATURE IN VERGIL. 91 And at the extreme border of the art of passion, we find in the A^ys what, as far as I know, is the first poetical study*^ of the counter-frenzy. This partly “ dramatic " lyric, for its horror and pathos, and its sense of correspondence between the moods of man and of nature, might be the work of the very boldest among romantic writers. If, after reaching this point in the growth of art, we turn back to Aristotle’s explan- ation of the pleasure produced by representations of what is unpleasant, we shall feel that it needs much stretching to include our charmed self-abandonment to the impetuous rush of Catullus’ lyric, charged with the passion and desolation of a ruined life. Once more, this sympathy between man and external nature is seen to be gaining depth and substance. It is idle to deny that the Athenian and Ionic poets have felt the spell of the outer world ; but in the Roman writers the increasing subtlety and detail of descriptive expression, though still immensely short of modern landscape poetry, bear witness to a refinement of conscious delight in natural beauty for its own sake which is different in principle from the reference to it, as in Homer, by allusive epithet or illustrative simile. It is most significant that Horace should have thought it necessary to protest against descriptive insertions.^ The principle which I am endeavouring to elucidate, that so long as art is alive its range of appreciation and expression extends itself by a natural process, in which the “ apperception ” of later artists is prepared by the recorded perceptions of their forerunners, could not be better illustrated than by a criticism which 1 will venture to quote at length, from one wh6 writes of what he well understands : — “ Everything,* then, in Vergil’s history, shows him a genuine poet of the country, and at the same time no one who really knows his poems can deny that they fully bear out the evidence of his life. It is true that he drew very largely on other poets, and could not disengage himself from the ante- cedents of his art. From Homer, Jdesiod, Aratus, or Theocritus, for example, come nearly all the passages in his works in which birds are mentioned. But though they * Ars P., 16. “They describe the grove and altar of Diana, or a rivet’!- course through pleasant fields, or the rainbow.” • A Year with the Birds, by an Oxford Tutor, p. no. 9 * HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. descend from these poets, and bear the features of their ancestors, they are yet a new and living generation, not lifeless copies modelled by a mere imitator ; and their beauty and their truth is not that of Greek but of Italian poetry. Let any one compare the translations of Aratus by other Roman hands, by Cicero, Festus, and Germanicus, with Vergil’s first Georgic, and he will not fail to mark the differ- ence between the mere translator, and the poet who breathes into the work of his predecessors a new life and an immortal one. There is hardly to be found, in the whole of Virgil’s poems, a single allusion to the habits of birds or any other animals, which is untrue to fact as we know it from Italian naturalists.” I do not doubt that the passages on which Vergil thus improves had served as guides and starting points for his own observation. And with the love of Nature we must compare its comple- ment and condition — the feeling of city-life. The intensifica- tion of pastoral sentiment by contrast with the busy splendour of Rome, lending an extraordinary stateliness to the verse which this combined emotion animates, is distinctly mirrored both in Virgil and in Horace. The nineteenth-century dweller in a huge city, whether London or Paris, Berlin or New York, is quite at home in this subtle sense of comple- mentary pleasures, in which the simple charm of country life is really to some extent a foil to the recognition of supreme powers and interests — “ res Roman* perituraque regna ” — centred in the city. These tw’o extremes therefore, the love of the country and the sympathy with town life— are there nobler lines in Vergil than the “ Si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis ? ” — unite in a new and dominating form of feeling, not possible to the world in any great degree before the Roman age. The “praises of Italy” express something more than an affection for Italian scenery. They are deeply coloured with historical sentiment, the sentiment of national duty belonging to the head of civilisation — an emotion of a nature to heighten and be heightened by the appreciation of the picturesqueness in life and manners produced by the relations of Rome with all quarters of the known world. The feeling of the picturesque is essentially historical, and though I do not think that we find its advanced form, such as the ALLEGORY IN ART. 93 admiration for ruined buildings, in any ancient writer,* yet this is only an outgrowth of the relation to humanity which is really at the root of all delight in external nature.* In any case, the feeling of a national “ mission ” by which Vergil was clearly inspired when he wrote of Rome, adds a new dignity and significance to all the external aspects of life, and communicates a fresh acuteness to feeling, and a peculiar majesty to expression. But we may notice in the constellation of Roman writers one sure sign of a decadence. The minor poets are the more complete artists. Lucretius and Vergil were, it might be said, too great as men to be complete as poets in an age whose mind was on the strain, and divided against itself. Much of Lucretius is pure science. Much of Vergil, though not arti- ficial in the most vulgar sense, as opposed to genuine or sincere, is yet dictated by practical or purely historical interest characteristic of the age, but incompatible with the simple- mindedness which belongs to art. FoimatiTe writing the history of fine art, Artaud but Only noting some salient points at which, by AieMtecture. influences, the working idea of beauty was deepened and enlarged. It is needless, therefore, to say much of formative art and architecture, the tendencies of which fall for the most part within the lines of those which have just been traced in literature. But it seems necessary to mention a few definite phenomena of extreme significance. One of these phenomena is the prevalence of “ allegorical ” treatment in the painting and sculpture of the fourth century and later. Allegory, as I understand it; is opposed both to natural symbolism, such as that by which the lines of a flower- bud indicate growth and vitality, and to a deeply rooted tradi- * There is an approach to the feeling in question in the famous letter of Sulpic. Ruf. Cic. Ad Fam., 4, 5, and in many epigrams of the first and second centuries b.c. See Mackail, Anthology, p. 62. * The degree in which this definite historical sentiment may fairly make a difference in the charm of landscape as such is' a very difficult question. Compare Vergil’s “Praises oi ItaXy” {Georgic 136 flf, esp. lines 167 ff.) with the following passage from Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 163 : “ Those ever-springing flowers and ever-flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue ; and the crests of the sable hills that ro-se against the evening sky received a deeper worship, be- cause their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four- square keep of Granson.” 94 HISTORY OF /€STHETIC, tional symbolism, such as that by which the goddess Athena was connected with ideas of courage and of wisdom. As a rule, therefore, an imaginative presentation which is named after an abstract idea has an allegorical character. Of course there are degrees of this relation. Eros, the love-god, for example, is primarily an imagined person with attributes fixed by tradition. No one would call him an allegory of love, because he is more than a mere sign with content limited to a definite intellectual idea. The question whether the statue of “ Kairos ” (Opportunity) by Lysippus was ‘ or was not strictly allegorical turns partly on the degree in which the conception was traditional — following for example, as is now alleged, the treatment of Hermes — and partly on the issue of fact whether it did or did not bear a knife, merely to recall the popular Greek phrase for a critical moment, “on the razor’s edge.” At any rate, the Calumnia of Apelles, Lucian’s description of which is embodied by Botticelli in the well- known picture of the Uffizi, must be considered as wholly allegorical, and it seems that allegorical figures representing such ideas as Virtue, Concord, Justice, and the like, formed a regular branch of sculpture in Greco-Roman times. Again, the ideal personification of towns, countries, and peoples, not unknown to the great time of Athenian art, takes a prominent place in the period before us. Such is the figure of “the Fortune of Antioch,” by Eutychides, a pupil of Lysip- pus.* This further connects itself with the peculiarly Roman art of triumphal relief, in which historical interest is substituted for artistic value. And the full antithesis to abstract allegory seems to be finally supplied by the great Greco- Roman art of genre and portrait sculpture ; which, however, through the ideal or deified portrait, such as that of Alexander as Zeus or of Antinous, eilmost returns again into the allegorical region. In other directions an analogous variety displays itself In the Rhodian school of sculpture we find a special tendency to situations of horror, cruel rather than tragic ; ® at the court of Attalus in Pergamus the hostile contact with the Gauls re- ‘ Carriere, ii. 396, treats it as an allegory. Overbeck, ii. 107, doubts this, on the grounds that, a, the treatment was traditional ; /J, the presence of the alleged attributes is uncertain. * Overbeck, ii. 134. * A tendency showed by painting in this epoch, from Parrhasius downward. Plut dt Aud, Poetis, 3. ARCHITECTURE. 95 suited in a new pathetic and characteristic interest, of which the statue of a dying Gaul, known as the “ dying Gladiator,” is a famous example. In Rome, again, towards the end of the Republic, the school of Pasiteles strangely combines the tendencies of refined sentimentalism, affected archaism, and anatomical observation from the living model. A certain development of landscape painting, to which the mural decorations in Pompeii bear witness, does not sustain the hypothesis of a direct appreciation of the beauty of scenery, which it might naturally suggest. It is a curious observation that “ on all the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum there is perhaps not one subject which can be positively identified as local." ' This indicates that the sources of inspiration were chiefly traditional, although the capacity of these painters for naturalistic execution — as, for example, in painting fruit — is spoken of by modern experts in the highest terms.* With reference to the position of architecture and the minor arts, after simply noting that such crafts as that of gem-cutting and gold and silver work, with the minute skill and subtlety which they imply, laid hold more and more on the interest of the wealthy Roman world, superseding the comparatively severe beauty of the painted earthenware vase, I may ven- ture to indulge the reader and myself in a somewhat long quotation from an author,® who best of all men is qualified to judge. I have found myself unable to express the essence of this passage in my own words either more shortly or more suitably for my purpose. “ Now this question of the transmission of the forms of Greek architecture leads us at once to thinking of that of Rome, since it was by this road that all of it went which was consciously accepted as a gift of the classical times. The subject of the origin of all that is characteristic in Roman art is obscure enough, much too obscure for my little knowledge even to attempt to see with it ; nay, even in speaking of it, I had better call it the art of the peoples collected under the Roman name ; so that I may be understood to include all the influences that went to its creation. ^ Art. ‘Archaeology,” EncycL Bfit., A. S. Murray. * EncycL “ Archaeology ” and “ Mural Decoration,” Prof. Middleton. Cf. Poynter, in lActures on Ari^ Macmillan, 1882. * Wm. Morris, in Lutur€$ on Art^ Macmillan, 1882, p. 151 ff 96 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. “ Now if we are asked what impression the gathered art of these peoples made upon modern art, I see nothing for it but to say that it invented architecture — no less. Before their time, indeed, temples took such and such forms among divers nations, and such and such ornament grew on them ; but what else was done with these styles we really do not know; a frivolous pleasure-town built in a late period and situate m Italy, — which destruction, so to say, has preserved for us — being the only token left to show what a Greek house might perhaps have been like. For the rest, in spite of all the wonders of Greek sculpture, we must needs think that the Greeks had done little to fix the future architecture of the world ; there was no elasticity or power of growth about the style ; right in its own country, used for the worship and aspirations which first gave it birth, it could not be used for anything else. But with the architecture of the men of the Roman name it was quite different. In the first place they seized on the great invention of the arch, the most important invention to home-needing men that has been or can be made. They did not invent it themselves, of course, since it was known in ancient Egypt, and apparently not uncommon in brick-building Babylonia ; but they were the first who used it otherwise than as an ugly necessity and in so using it, they settled what the architecture of civilisation must hence- forward be. Nor was their architecture, stately as it was, any longer fit for nothing but a temple — a holy railing for the shrine or symbol of the god ; it was fit for one purpose as for another — church, house, aqueduct, market-place, or castle ; nor was it the style of one country or climate ; it would fit itself to north or south, snow-storm or sand-storm alike. Though pedants might make inflexible rules for its practice when it was dead or dying, when it was alive it did not bind itself too strictly to rule, but followed, in its constructive part at least, the law of nature ; in short, it was a new art, the great art of civilisation. " True it is that what we have been saying of it applies to it as a style of building chiefly ; in matters of ornament the arts of the conquered did completely taka the conqueror captive, and not till the glory of Rome was waning, and its dominion became a tax-gathering machine, did it even begin to strive to shake off the fetters of Greece ; and still, through all those centuries, the Roman lords of the world thought the ROMAN AND BYZANTINE ART. 97 little timber god’s house a holy form, and necessary to be impressed on all stately architecture. It is a matter of course that the part of the architectural ornament of the Romans, which may be definitely called pattern-design, shared fully in this slavery; it was altered and somewhat spoiled Greek work, less refined, and less forbearing. Great swinging scrolls mostly formed of the Acanthus foliage, not very various or delicate in their growth, mingled with heavy rolling flowers, form the main part of the Roman pattern design that clove to the arts. There is no mystery in them, and little interest in their growth, though they are rich and handsome ; indeed, they scarcely do grow at all, they are rather stuck together ; for the real connected pattern, where one member grows naturally and necessarily out of another — where the whole thing is alive as a real tree or flower is — all this is an in- vention of what followed Roman art, and is unknown both to the classical and the ancient world. Nevertheless, this invention, when it came, clothed its soul in a body which was chiefly formed of the Greco- Roman ornament, so that this splendid Roman scroll-work, though not very beautiful in itself, is the parent of very beautiful things. It is, perhaps, in the noble craft of mosaic — which is a special craft of the Roman name — that the foreshadowing of the new art is best seen. In the remains of this art you may note the growing formation of more mysterious and more connected, as well as freer and more naturalistic design ; their colour, in spite often of the limitation forced on the workman by simple materials, is skilfully arrayed and beautiful ; and in short there is a sign in them of the coming of the wave of that great change which was to turn late Roman art, the last of the old, into Byzantine art, the first of the new. “It lingered long. For long there was still some show of life in the sick art of the older world ; that art had been so powerful, so systematized, that it was not easy to get rid even of its dead body. The first stirrings of change were felt in the master-art of architecture, or, once^more, in the art of building. As I said before in speaking of the earliest build- ing that shows this movement, the palace at Spalato, the ornamental side of the art lagged long behind the construc- tional. In that building you .see for the first time the arch acting freely, and without the sham support of the Greek beam architecture ; henceforth, the five orders are but pieces H 98 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. of history, until the time when they were used by the pedants of the Renaissance to enslave the world attain.” It has been necessary in the foregoing review of the Hellenistic and Greco- Roman decadence to lay stress on its positive achievements, from which the reflective aesthetic consciousness of the time had to draw its material. I am aware that 1 run the risk of being asked whether I mean to deny that there really was a decadence, whether I have for- gotten the vulgar and brutal features of Greco- Roman civilisa- tion, and whether I imagine that the intellectual darkness, extending to the great individual forms of art, which followed upon the Christian era, was a historical accident unconnected with a moral and intellectual bankruptcy in ancient lif A thorough treatment of this question can only be attempted in connection with the philosophical side of our subject.* It must suffice at present to suggest that the features which indicate a decay in the civilisation of the old world are them- selves one great term in the set of contrasts which i have been attempting to represent. The spirit which was ulti- mately destined to burst the bonds of classical tradition began by to some extent reanimating it ; but that in the old life which could not be inspired with new meaning naturally fell into greater and greater corruption. And it was natural that the process of forging sensuous forms adequate to a new impulse should be tedious and gradual in proportion to the greatness of that impulse, and that during a long transition the spirit should be for the most part hostile to sense or the flesh, although the continuity underneath the transition was never really broken. Through all the surface conflicts of intellect and feeling and faith, the unconscious art of architecture, in which necessity blossoms into expression, continued to develop, so that the problem of reconciliation was solved by going on, and spiritual religion had found a sensuous manifestation be- fore it knew that it needed one. The degree in which, before the revival of letters, the tradition of the old world, whether in art or in speculation, continuously affected the new, is a most difficult and interesting question. But it must be re- membered that we are only now adjusting our historical consciousness to the conception that the Christian era marked * For a statement of it see Prof. Harnack, Art. “ Neo- Platonism,” Encycl. Brif Partial philosophies. 99 no miraculous new birth of the world, and it is probable that the continuity of progress has hitherto been under-estimated rather than the reverse. Refleouve In turning to the reflective aesthetic of the Atbetie. Alexandrian and Greco- Roman age, we must at once admit that we have to deal, not with complete systems in continuous succession, but with tendencies fragmentarily indicated. Numbers of post- Aristotelian treatises on art are lost to us ; but it is also clear that true aesthetic speculation was not, and could not be, a matter of central interest to the predominant philosophies before Neo- Platon ism. The theory of beauty can only be fertile for the thought which grasps life as a whole ; in half-systems such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, or Scepticism, there is no place for the belief that reality may find utterance in human feeling or fancy. And although Neo- Platonism was also a half-system, being fundamentally mysti- cal, that is to say, having lost faith in life and science, and being compelled for that reason to yield the sceptre to Christianity, yet just as Christianity, although a concrete principle of life, constantly fell into repellent onesidedness, so Neo- Platonism, though not a concrete principle of life, was profound enough to inspire a great mind for a time with a comprehensive faith in the reasonableness of reality. But partial philosophies are often definitely suggestive just because they make the most of the little which they acknow- ledge, and here Stoicism and Epicureanism are no exceptions. After saying something of these philosophies in their aesthetic aspect, it will be necessary to comment shortly upon the more literary and rhetorical criticism, before' closing the present chapter with a reference to Neo- Platonic theory in the third century a.d. i. The Stoic Pantheism led Chrysippus in the stcdo. third century b.c. to the conception that “ many animals have been produced by nature with a view to beauty, in which she takes delight, enjoying their colouring ” ; * and, for example, that the peacock was produced for the sake of his tail, because of its beauty. Rash as such a suggestion must appear to us, who cannot find room in nature for any purpose, but only for causation, it has the merit of unmistakably signalising the fact and problem of natural beauty, which is. ^ )(aipov(ra ry woifctXti^ PL’t» dc Stoic, 21. ICX> HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. however it may have come to be so, analogous to man’s creations, and harmonious with man’s emotions. " The universe alone is perfect,” says Cicero,* quoting Chrysippus ; “ man is not, though he has in him some particle of the perfect, and he is born to contemplate and imitate the universe.” The mere laxity of the language seems to bring these ideas near to us ; we hear sentiments that ring like them from Christian divines and from nineteenth-century art-critics. To “contemplate and imitate” might surely at least include to reproduce in plastic and poetic form ; and some Stoics were not wholly without such a liberal conception. Poseidonius, two centuries after Chrysippus, described poetry, almost on the lines of Aristotle, as “ comprising an imitation of human and divine things.” But this was not the ordinary Stoic meaning, and it became less and less so. They took the imitation of the universe rather in the sense familiar to us from George Herbert : — “ Entice the trusty sun, if that thou can. From his ecliptic line, beckon the sky. Who lives by rule then, keeps good company.” The mechanical view of imagination, the negative or intellectualist view of emotion, the complete subordination of “ theoretical ” to “ practical ” interest characteristic of an age for which practice had become chiefly an affair of theory, all these influences hindered the Stoic from completing his view of man’s place in nature by an adequate theory of aesthetic expression. And at last, in Seneca, by a disordered reminis- cence of Plato which we shall trace among the Epicureans as well, the formative arts are reckoned as mere ministers to sense, like the art of cookery. The only true liberal art, for him, is philosophy — the art which aims at virtue — and poetry in so far as it is capable of being made a vehicle for philoso- phic ideas. For speculative purposes such a conception means a complete obliteration of all fruitful distinctions. ii. The Epicurean school were opposed to the pcnrean. belief in Providence and in a reasonable kinship between man and nature, and therefore, for the oppo- site reason to the Stoics, but like them in the result, they dis- believed in the objective value of art as expressing a reason- able content. “ Music,” writes Philodemus, a contemporary of * D* Nat. Z>*0rum, ii., 14. LUCRETIUS. JOI Cicero, is “ irrational and cannot affect the soul or the emotions, and is no more an expressive art [lit. imitative] than cookery.” * This censure is aimed straight at the principal line of advance towards a profound analysis of expression which we observed in Plato and more especially in Aristotle. - The aesthetic of mere feeling, resting as it does on the acceptance of simple facts as to what gives certain pleasures, joins hands with the opposite extreme, the aesthetic of pure form. I cannot assent to Schasler’s contemptuous treatment * of the powerful lines in which Lucretius refers the harsh scream of the saw and the musical sound of a skilfully played instrument to the respective angularity and smoothness of the physical elements operative in each case, and proceeds to apply a similar explanation to colours and to smells. Of course this assertion was for him but a guess, and it may be that in the two latter cases it will never be justified. But the difference between harshness and harmony in musical sound is a difference in impact on the organ, which is at least conveniently symbolised by difference of shape® in the graphi- cal representation of the impinging movement, and although a difference in sensuous agreeableness does not explain or coincide with every difference in artistic beauty, yet it is an essential element of aesthetic to understand the former, if only in order to show the limits of its connection with the latter. The historical hypotheses thrown out by the same poet in another passage* — that men learnt song from birds, and instrumental music from the wind in the reeds — are notably inferior to the aesthetic anthropology of Aristotle. Yet a pervading idea of human progress and & resolute adherence to physical explanations conjoined with a large sense of natural beauty, to which as in Virgil the movement of the verse is magically responsive, confer upon Lucretius some- thing of the splendour and mystery which belong to our own feeling for a beauty founded in necessity. ^ I quote from Muller, 2, 193 : onSc yap fLip,r)TiK.^ r) plovo-lk^ /aqAAov i97rcp 17 fjLayfLpLKij. * AW/. Geschichte der Aesth,y i. 210. Lucret., ii. 408. ® Cf. Helmholtz, Popular Scientific Lectures^ Series I., p. 68 (E. Tr.). “Tuning forks, with their rounded forms of wave, have an extraordinarily soft quality ; and the qualities of tone generated by the zither and violin resemble in harshness the angularity of their wave forms.” ^ Lucr., 5, 1378. 102 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. AriBtarobns and The Alexandrian literary criticism of Aris- zouiu. tarchus and Zoilus in the third century b.c., must just be mentioned as contributing to the formation of a his- torical sense, if only in the inferior form of a canon or class- list of great writers, which repeats itself in later Roman criticism.* It would seem indeed that Zoilus must have worked rather to enslave interpretation by a captiously literal reading, than, like Aristotle, to liberate it by an intelligent allowance for figures of speech. The habit of recognising a “ canon ” of writers, with a parallelism, usually groundless, between Greek and Roman authors, was connected with the custom of classifying styles under three categories, or tacking on a single distinctive epithet to every writer — a tendency of which the more appreciative side is exemplified by the poetical introduction to Meleager’s Garland of Poets. It is very curious that the distinction of the three styles was not merely applied to Homer’s speakers, but ascribed to Homer as having been remarked by him ; * an idea which, in respect of the two extremes of a copious and a neat style, is really not without foundation in Antenor’s remarks on the speaking of Ulysses and Menelaus. The formation of a medium beside the two extremes would readily suggest itself. All this aspect of literary and rhetorical criticism is apt to appear to us to be idle and tedious. But it helped to con- dition more important movements. Later Greco- iv. The rhetorical interest of the later Roman Boman criuce. critics produced a substantially liberal appreciation of the aims of art, though it was for the most part not couched in aesthetic form. After all, oratory, like art, is a mode of self-expression ; and the comparison or confusion of poetry with oratory — formative art being by a stock simile connected with poetry — emphasizes the expressive purposes and organs of art. Some of the criticism suggested by the analogy thus obtained between oratory and formative art shows a high degree of historical sympathy. Thus Dionysius of Hali- carnassus® in the first century b.c. writes : “ There are ancient pictures, simple in colouring and without variety in the mix- tures of pigments, but true {oKpifieh, severe ?) in outline and * Prof. H. Nettleship, in Journal of Philologv, xviii. 230 ff. * Cf. Prof. H. Nettleship l.c. w. quotation from Gellius. See Iliad, 3, aoo. " See Prof. Nettleship, l.c CICERO. 103 poSiessing a great charm in this respect ; while the later ones are less good in outline but are more elaborately finished with varying effects of chiaroscuro, and have their strong point in the variety of mixtures.” We have not the pictures in ques- tion ; but the description seems to correspond to the well- known difference between art in its youth and in its decay. When Aristotle said that all the work of the ancient artists was bad, let us hope that hfe was referring to a different period !* But yet criticism was stereotyping itself and losing its vitality. Even in Cicero we find a tendency to brief and formal characterisation of the great painters and sculptors, though the writer is still animated by a real love for their art ; in Quintilian the originality appears to be less, and the school- book tendency greater,* while, to make a long story short. Pronto, in the third century, a.d., writes as if he had been taught a single epithet for each artist or poet. In Cicero however, in the work on the Sublime which passes under the name of Longinus, in Plutarch, in Dio Chrysostom, and in Philostratus there is something more that calls for notice. Cicero was an eclectic in philosophy, and we are not to expect original speculation from him. Yet he was earnest, candid, and thoroughly well read, while retaining the power of direct perception that marks a man versed in practical life. Thus, when he presupposes the Greek view of beauty as con- stituted by an apt relation of the parts to the whole,* we see that this view had become a commonplace of reflection ; when he travesties* the Platonic doctrine of abstract forms by identi- fying the form of beauty with a mental picture from which the artist copies, which is apparently the same for a Zeus and for an Athena, and which in “our” minds is always capable of a higher beauty than that of the greatest work of Pheidias, we understand that he takes art so seriously as to identify the artist’s mental image with that supreme objective order which Plato precisely denied that the artist could ever apprehend or represent. We must not lose sight of the practical reversal of Plato’s position for the better whi2h this identification involves, while condemning the outrageous abstraction by * Problemata, 895 a 35. * For this judgment I rely chiefly on Prof. Nettleship, l.c. * De OJficiis, i, 27. * Orator., cc 2 and 3. 104 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC which the mental ideal is treated as though it were an iniyrte idea, not dependent on genius, labour, and experience. And along with this seriousness in Cicero’s estimate of art we find, as in the Roman poets, an increasing sensitiveness to the beauty of natural scenery, combined as in Chrysippus and constantly in modern times with a sentimental form of the argument from design.^ There is perhaps a lack of distinction between beauty and use, but on the other hand there is some- thing approaching to a feeling for the picturesque and the sublime. And the absurd reference to a single abstract and apparently innate form of beauty is more than atoned for by the really important suggestion, “ Seeing that there are two kinds of beauty, one of which consists in grace, the other in dignity ; we must consider grace as feminine, and dignity as masculine beauty.” * The subdivision of beauty (apart from so-called moral and intellectual beauty) into kinds is a step which I do not know to have been explicitly taken before this date. Aristotle can only be said to do it inferentially, as a consequence of the distinction between forms of art. It is a step incompatible with adherence to the mere formal aesthetic of Hellas, and is an essential condition of a more appreciative analysis. The work on the Sublime, bearing the name of Longinus, a man of letters of the third century a.d., and secretary to Zenobia, is now on the whole believed by the best authorities® to belong to a date soon aftei the time of Augustus. The mere existence of the word “sublimity,” lit. “height,” as a technical term in aesthetic or rhetorical criticism, — one of a vast number of such technical terms current in the Greco-Roman age,* — is a notable fact. The philosophical importance of the treatise is rather in its evidence that consciousness has be- come sensitive in this direction than in any systematic insight into the nature of the sublime. Nevertheless the writer has ‘ De Natura Deorum, xxxviii., xxxix. “ Let us dismiss refinements of dis- pute, and look with our own eyes at the beauty of those things which we allege to be formed by divine providence.” Rough rocks, caves, and mountains are named in this list of beauties. * De Officiis, I, 36. Had Schiller this passage before him in Anmuth u. Wurdel * See A. Lang’s Introd. to Havell’s Lonf^nus. * Prof. H. Ncttleship,yi?///‘«<// of PhUology, xviii. 236. THE SUBLIME. 105 elements of such insight “ Sublimity is, so to say, the image of greatness of soul,”* “It was not in nature’s plan for us, her chosen children, to be base and ignoble — no, she brought us into life and into the whole universe, as into some great field of contest, that we should be at once spectators and ambitious rivals of her mighty deeds, and from the first im- planted in our souls an invincible yearning for all that is great, all that is diviner than ourselves. Therefore even the whole world is not wide enough for the soaring range of human thought, but man’s mind often overleaps the very bounds of space. When we survey the whole circle of life, and see it abounding everywhere in what is elegant, grand and beautiful, we learn at once what is the true end of man’s being. And this is why nature prompts us to admire, not the clearness and usefulness of a little stream, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and far beyond all the Ocean.”® “ When a writer uses any other resource, he shows himself to be a man ; but the Sublime lifts him near to the great spirit of the Deity.”* Whereas then in statuary we look for close resemblance to humanity, in literature we require something which transcends humanity — a remark bearing closely on the place* of sculpture in ancient, and poetry in modern art. On the other hand, as showing that there is not really a definite grasp of any distinc- tive notion of the Sublime, we may note such a description as this, “ when a passage is pregnant in suggestion, when it is hard, nay impossible, to distract the attention from it, and when it takes a strong and lasting hold on the memory, then we may be sure that we have lighted on the true Sublime.” ® We may say, perhaps, that the writer was fairly on the track of some such conception as that of the Sublime depending on an effort or reaction on the part of the mind, occasioned by some form of contest with the suggestion of magnitude or force, in which effort or reaction the subject becomes assured of a deeper spiritual strength in himself than he commonly experiences. The absence of any persistent attempt to drag out the essence of the matter by definition is exceedingly remarkable, and the writer’s real stren^h is in his literary judgment and the selection of examples. In the discussion of style he betrays a consciousness that ‘ Havell’s Longinus, p. 15 (c. ix.). ® Havell’s Longinus, p. 68. ** Ib., c. xxxvi. p. 69. * Ib., p. 70. * ib., cvii. p. 12. io6 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. sublimity has some connection with incompleteness, but this idea, which forms rightly or wrongly an important factor in the theory of Kant, he does not pursue to any speculative result. He is very much alive to the false sublime — frigidity or bombast — as proceeding mainly from over-elaboration of conceits, and is thus well aware that reserve and suggestive- ness are connected with the Sublime. And it is a notable sign of the times that Hebrew poetry here first appears within the field of Greek aesthetic. “And thus also the law-giver of the Jews, no ordinary man, having formed an adequate conception of the Supreme Being, gave it adequate expression in the opening words of his ‘ Laws ’ : God said — what ? — ‘ Let there be light,’ and there was ; ‘ let there be land,’ and there was." * However philosophically incomplete, this work adds one to the distinctions which experience was revealing within the sphere of beauty, and is probably responsible for the exceed- ingly important part played by the theory of the Sublime in modern speculation. * Plutarch of Chaeronea, 50-100 a.d., attacks both Stoics and Epicureans, and does not, so far as I know, profess himself an adherent of any school of philosophy. For our present purpose the most significant of his works is a discussion of the question, how, in view of the base and immoral matter treated of by poets, young men are to read them [“ hear ’’ them] without sustaining moral injury. In spite of his moralistic attitude, the imbecility of some of his advice and interpretations, and the want of intelligence in his constant references to the arguments and poetical quotations of Plato’s Republic, he has the merit of stating in plainer terms than Aristotle — owing to the accumulation of ecsthetic experience during the long interval between them — the strictly eesthetic question : ‘‘ Can what is really ugly become beautiful in art ?’’ No doubt he perpetually confuses this with the ques- tion : “ Do we commend an act morally because we admire it in a work of art ? ’’ which he rightly answers in the negative, but which is not a problem of aesthetic, but only of the dis- tinction between aesthetic and ethics. * />., c. ix. p. 18. * It was first edited in modern Europe in 1544, and often since, notably by Boileau in 1674. See Lang’s Introduction to Havell’s Longinus. PLUTARCH. 107 But he also raises the real problem in distinct terms — the terms of ugliness and beauty, asking in effect, “ Can what is ugly in itself be beautiful in art ? If Yes, can the art-repre- sentation be suitable to and consistent with its original If No, how does it happen that we admire such art-representa- tions ” I have framed the above question out of Plutarch’s answer,’ which runs thus : “In essence the ugly cannot be- come beautiful ; but the imitation is admired if it is a likeness. The picture of an ugly thing cannot be a beautiful picture ; if it were, it could not be suitable to or consistent with its origi- nal. . . . Beauty, and to imitate beautifully [which can- not mean to make a beautiful picture, but only to imitate successfully] are quite different things.” And “ the reason* why we admire such representations in art, both poetic and pic- torial,* is because the artist’s cunning has an affinity for our intelligence, as may be observed in the fondness of children for toy animals, and in such cases as that of the audience who preferred Parmeno’s imitation of a squeaking pig to the real The mere looseness of Plutarch’s language in this explana- tion seems to give his view a generality which places it in advance of the precisely limited analysis furnished by Aris- totle, through a reference to the enjoyment of inference. But Plutarch is still essentially on the same ground as Aristotle. He, like Aristotle, is speaking of the response of our intelli- gence to the artist’s skill, not of the affinity between the artist’s intelligence and the significance of the things which he portrays. The natural sense-perception * is the same, he expressly says, with that which the artist gives us; that is, the latter owes nothing of its content to the passage through a human mind. The only difference between the two is in our concomitant knowledge whether the presentation is natural or artificial. This is for him the moral of the story about Parmeno, and excludes the interpretation that the audience preferred the ventriloquist’s imitation because it was exag- gerated with humorous intention, which ^ould be the natural explanation from a modern point of view. This example is ^ De Audiendis Poctis iii. ® Su/ittoo-. irpo/SX.^ v. i. ^ Plutarch insists on this stock comparison to show that poetry being imita- tive, like painting, is not wholly responsible for the nature of .its subjects. * Sv/ATT. irpojSX., V. I, TO auTo al<r6rj(r€m irdOo^ ovx 6p.oto»s SiaTiOrjaL t^v fijj 7rpo<rQ 86(a tov Xovikws ^ TrepaiVctr^ai to yiyvo/Acvov. io8 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. a Strange counterpart to Kant’s case of the nightingale imitated by the human voice, which, he says, becomes tedious the moment the deception is discovered. The common ground must be that we expect more from a man than from an animal, only in the one case we think we get it, and in the other we do not. Though, therefore, Plutarch does not help us to understand kow art appeals to our intelligence, except in the mere fact of its power to copy, yet it is very remarkable that he thinks himself a champion of the intellect as concerned in the artistic pleasure of painful subjects, against the Epicureans,* who ascribed it to mere sensation without the countervailing pain of knowing the suffering to be real. But his only genuine advance upon Aristotle lies in the urgency which the problem of ugliness in art had acquired for him, as evinced by the very numerous examples which he gives of it (though not adequately distinguishing it from the painful and the immoral), and by the definiteness with which he states the strictly aes- thetic problem, “ Can the ugly, if represented in a way appropriate to it [in short, without falsification], be beautiful in art,^” In estimating the value of Plutarch’s answer, “It remains ugly, but we rightly take pleasure in it by reason of the intelligence involved in obtaining the likeness,” we must not forget that the power to copy is a phase, though elementary, of the power to re-create by intelligence. And therefore to recognise a legitimate pleasure in the skill that copies what is ugly, is the germ of a recognition that what is apparently ugly, but admirable in art, has something in it which the trained perception can appreciate as beautiful. Dio Chrysostom, a Bithynian (a.d. 50-117), a writer of popular lectures on philosophical subjects, makes in two re- spects a distinct advance on what we know of his predecessors. First, he* recognises the ideal for art, quite in the opposite sense to that of Cicero, as a concrete form in which the artist gives adequate reality to conceptions which before and apart from such realisation are not definite ; so that the result is not that after seeing the Pheidian statue of Zeus every one * Xv/J-Trocr. wpo^X.., l.c. The Epicureans, it seems, pointed out that the actor can represent suffering better than the sufferer can. Tins is the point which Plutarch, if a true art-theorist, ought himself to have made, but does not make. * Dion. Chrys. dt Dei Cognitione Oral., 12, p. 402, Reiske. mo CHRYSOSTOM. 109 can imagine something more beautiful ; but that after seeing it, no one can imagine the god in any other way. Obviously we are here on the track which Herodotus, with his naive profoundness, had entered 500 years before. A E articular case of this conception is the treatment of the uman form ^ as the most adequate visible symbol of the invisible quality of intelligence — a striking anticipation of modern ideas, in some degree itself anticipated by the Xeno- phontic Socrates. And secondly, Dio Chrysostom examines the commonplace comparison between poetry and formative art with a view, not merely to the resemblances, but also to the differences between them ; drawing attention to the larger field open to language both in the kind of ideas represented, as it has words alike for the sensuous and the non-sensuous, and in the time and action® included in its descriptions contrasted with the single moment and attitude into which the formative artist must compress all that he desires to convey. The above views are expounded in a criticism,® or rather panegyric of the Olympian Zeus of Pheidias, which reads almost as if the demands of Christianity were already stimu- lating the adherents of older creeds to demonstrate a spiritual and human significance in their own conception of deity. In Philostratus (first half of third century a.d.), author of the life of Apollonius of Tyana, and of the description of a real or imaginary collection of paintings at Naples, there is much matter of aesthetic interest Two points are all to which attention can here be drawn. First, in the biography of Apollonius, the antithesis of ^ Id. ib., Reiske, 404. I translate this remarkable passage, “ No sculptor or painter can portray reason and wisdom as they are in themselves. For having no perception or experience of such things, but knowing for certain in what they come to pass, we make it our resource, investing the god with the human body, the vessel of wisdom and reason— seeking to manifest the imageless and unseen in the visible, which can be portrayed— better than the way in which some of the barbarians make lUtenesses of their gods as animals.” * Id. ib., 410., “We (sculptors) have to make each likeness in a single attitude ; which must be stable and permanent, and comprise in it the whole nature and quality of the god. But the poets may include many forms in their poetry, and ascribe movement and rest and actions and words to their personages.” ® Dion. Chrysost. de Dei Cognitione Orat,, la. no HISTORY OF iESTHETiC. imitation and imagination as two co-ordinate principles of art is stated with the full consciousness of its novelty and impor- tance. Apollonius ' is attacking the Egyptian representations of gods in animal forms. The Egyptian interlocutor retorts in effect, “ How do you know your Greek representations are any truer ? Did your Pheidiases go up to heaven and take the gods’ likenesses, or did something else guide them in their work?” “Something else guided them — a thing full of wisdom.” “What was that? You cannot mention any such thing, except imitation.” “It was imagination that wrought these forms, a more cunning artist than imitation. Imitation will make what it has seen, but imagination will make what it has not seen.” [This does not necessarily mean “ the invisible,” but may include it]. But secondly, it is more remarkable still that this opposition, which in its unmitigated form is thoroughly vicious — that is to say, when imagination is treated not as directing but as supplanting the presentation of reality — at once begins to shade off into the more modern idea of a mental (or, as we should say, imaginative) imitation. It is this inward imitative power, we are told for example, that makes us see the forms of animals in the clouds,* which are not really there, or see a negro face drawn in white chalk as the portrait of a black man. But though the opposition is thus mitigated, it is not destroyed. Inward or mental imitation does not for Philo- stratus amount to imagination. For us, however, in view of his instances, it is not easy to distinguish them. He keeps very far indeed from confounding the fantastic with the imaginative. Rather, it would appear, he finds true imagination in the invention and suitability, the higher degree of significance and expression, which he esteems in a picture above truth to nature on the one band, and formal beauty on the other. “Any one,” he says, “professing to describe a picture of Ariadne in Naxos, could paint a beautiful Theseus and a beautiful Ariadne, but the Dionysus is painted simply ^ Philostr., Vita Apoll. Tyan.y vi. 19. I quote from Overbeck, Schrift- quelltn zur Geschichte d, Bildenden Kunste^ 801, compared with Muller, ii. 317. * Quoted in Muller, ii. 319 , oAAa firf rovro /SovAci Acyciv roo-avra /jlIv acrri/Ad rt icai €Tv\€ Sid tov ovpavov ^cpeo-^at, rdyt ctti rw ^co>, •qfidz $c ^vcrct t 6 ft,ifnfTiKo¥ i;(oyra 9 dyappv^pii(€iy rc a^a fcai iroiciv* PLOTIKirS. Ill as dictated by his love.”^ How invention and expression are brought together in his conception may be illustrated by a curious piece of sentiment which he praises in a landscape, where a male palm tree leans across a stream so as to touch a female palm with its branches, forming a kind of bridge. The recognition of sentiment in landscape is an important datum in the history of art ; whether in this instance the sentiment is of the best kind is a different question. This recognition of imagination as the power of creating an adequate expression for intelligence and sentiment, places the conception of Philostratus on a higher level than the idealising imitation of Aristotle, in which the difficulty in what direction to idealise is not coped with as a matter of principle. piotiiHu. Egypt, 205 A.D., a pupil of Ammonius Saccas of Alexandria, taught in Rome from 245 A.D. till his death in 270 a.d. The tradition that Ammonius was an apostate * from Christianity on account of its hostility to the arts and sciences may serve to remind us of the varied influences under which Neo-Platonism arose, although it does not appear ® to be ascertainable how far in fact Ammonius and Plotinus were acquainted with earlier Alexandrian speculations, or with Judaic or Christian theo- logy. It is natural to regard a non-Christian philosopher who writes in Greek in the century before Constantine as belonging to late antiquity ; but Plotinus has also been treated as be- longing to the early middle age.* The doubt indicates his position better than any decision. N^eo- Platonism is a counter-part of Christianity, but in a disguise of half- Hellenic theory which curbs its freedom. It is, as we said before, a half-system, of the kind known as mystical ; which does not mean that it is too spiritual, but that, intending to be wholly spiritual, it is really not spiritual enough ; for, like Christian rnonasticism. it interprets the spiritual renunciation of the world in a material fashion. It shares however with Christianity the reaction against the still more partial systems 1 Philostr., Imagines, i. 15, Muller, ii. 324, aXX'ourosyto Awkwos {k /ioi'm Tov €pav ycypairrttt. 2 Erdmann, E. Tr. i. 237. ® Harnack, art. “Neo- Platon ism,” EncycL Brit ^ Erdmann, Lc. 112 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC that immediately preceded it ; it rejects all compromise with sensual self-seeking, and has faith in a reality deeper than phenomenal nature, deeper than civic or national relations, deeper even than mind. Like Plato’s Form of the Good, to which it corresponds in being above existence,' this Unity or Primal God is above reason, and above the life of the world, which two latter principles are identified by historians with the Aristotelian “ intelligence,” and the Stoic “universal life.”* As derivative, these two elements are necessarily in- ferior, and the adherence to this axiom of subordination, that the derived is necessarily below the original, distinguishes Neo-Platonism from a true evolutionary doctrine, such as was latent though not at first obvious in Christianity. But much as Plotinus renounces, in the way of knowledge and practical life, he refuses to renounce material beauty. In the directness with which it is perceived beauty has an ana- logy to mystical intuition which often makes it find favour with those who think methodic science too circuitous for an available avenue to truth. It is worth while to recall, in treating of Plotinus, those three antitheses by which we attempted to gauge the antici- pations of a larger sesthetic that were to be found in Plato and Aristotle. It will be remembered that each of these antitheses corresponded to a characteristic feature not indeed of Greek aesthetic theory, for as regards two out of the three Greek theory fell short of an aesthetic standpoint, but of Greek con- ceptions relating to the bc<autiful. We arranged them as — i. The antithesis of imiuition and symbolism, corresponding to the metaphysical problem : “ What kind of reality does art represent ? ” ii. The antithesis of aesthetic and practical interest, corre- sponding to the moralistic problem ; “ Is the content of beauty related to the will in the same way as the motives of practical life.?” iii. The antithesis of abstract and concrete criticism, corre- sponding to the true aesthetic problem : “ Is the nature of beauty exhausted by the formal definition which identifies it with the sensuous presentation of unity in variety, or is a wider and deeper content traceable in it by observation and analysis .? ” We saw that the limitations of purely Greek theory in these ^ cTTCKeti tt Ty<s ourtas, vi., p. 509. ® Enlinann, l.c. SYMBOLISM IN PLOTINUS. ri3 several respects were intimately connected together, and it follows that no substantive advance could be made in one of the three problems without tending to stimulate an advance in respect of the other twa But the third being more directly dependent on experience and observation was capable of gain- ing considerably in depth and breadth of treatment during an interval in which speculation was unequal to readjusting the other two doctrines in conformity with this new analysis. And such an interval had elapsed, in spite of occasional gleams of philosophic intelligence, between Aristotle and Plotinus. Little of theoretical value either on the distinction between imitation and symbolism, or on the distinction between aesthe- tic and practical interest, has been adduced in our review of aesthetic reflection current during this period. And there is no reason to suppose that of the numerous writings which are lost any rose considerably above the philosophical level of those which have come down to us. Only in the later writers, such as the author of the treatise “ on the Sublime,” Dio Chrysos- tom, Philostratus, we find a tendency to recognise in so many words that art is not a mirror of common perception, but an expression of something great or reasonable in a sensuous form. Even this recognition, however, is so little elaborated in theory that it belongs rather to the deepest recognition of an expres- siveness beyond mere formal symmetry than to a doctrine of the relation between art and reality. Symbolism. a. Such a doctrine we do find in Plotinus. The realisation, he is explaining,^ is indeed always less than the idea, and the created less than the creator — this is the point on which he is still Platonic, and which makes his theory one of emanation and not of evolution — “ but still,” he continues, “ if any one condemns the arts, because they create by way of imitation of nature, first we must observe that natural things themselves are an imitation of something further [viz. of underlying reasons or ideas], and next we must bear in mind that the arts do not simply imitate the visible, but go back to the reasons* from which nature y:omes ; and further. that they create riiuch out of themselves, and add to that which is defective, as being themselves in possession of beauty ; since Pheidias did not create his Zeus after any perceived pattern, but made him such as he would be if Zeus deigned to ‘ Creuzer’s ed., p. looa * Xoyovt. HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 1 14 appear to mortal eyes.” This passage /eaves no doubt of t/ie writer’s intention to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Plato in his “three removes from truth.” ^ It seems natural, too, with Dio and Philostratus in our minds, to suppose that the truth claimed for the Pheidian statue is that of adequate symbolism for a god whose nature is spiritual, and not that of Imaginative representation of a god who is material, though as a rule unseen by man. It is needless to enlarge here on the philosophical signifi- cance of this passage, which the discussion of Plato’s position has fully prepared us to appreciate. It is true that Plotinus retains the self-contradictory conception of spiritual or im- material beauty by the side of the idea of natural beauty ; but as the latter is not defined, or not merely defined, by its relation to the former, but is explained in terms of other attributes, the value of the theory as dealing with material is not seriously impaired. “A beautiful material thing * is pro- duced by participation in reason issuing from the divine.” This sentence sums up the conception. Plato’s whole terminology is modified and re-applied by Plotinus in this sense. Material beauty is still an image or a shadow, but it is an image or shadow issuing from reason, and appealing to the soul through the same power by which reason brings order into matter. A portrait,* indeed, ^ it give the mere features and no more, is, as Plato would have called it, an image of an image, and thus Plotinus evokes from the Platonic view that deep aesthetic significance which we saw that it might really claim. Therefore the whole metaphysical assumption that art is limited by ordinary perception, which assumption is one with the imitative theory of fine art, is now broken through. It is henceforth understood that art is not imitative but symbolic. JEstlietlc /3. What, then, is the nature of aesthetic interest Interest qj. bgauty, and is it distinct from prac- tical interest or desire ? The answer is unambiguous and complete. In tJie material beautiful, and not merely in the cunning of the artist’s imita- tion as Aristotle'' and Plutarch suggested, the soul recognises ‘ Rep., X. * Creuzer, p. loa. • Porphyry’s Lift of Plotinus. UGLINESS. 1*5 an affinity to itself. This affinity consists * in the participation in reason and form, and is co-extensive with the beautiful. For the ugly is either that which being capable of rational form has not received it ; or that which is incapable of rational form and refuses to be moulded by it. Hence beauty is only in the form, not in the material, and this must be so as it is the form alone * that can ^nter our apprehension. The exclusion of desire for the sensuous reality from the interest in the beautiful is effected by this view of aesthetic semblance as thoroughly as by that of Schiller. Thus, in strict theory, the moralistic limitation of beauty is thrown aside, as we foresaw, together with its metaphysical limitation. Beauty comes to be regarded as a direct expres- sion of reason in sense by way of aesthetic semblance only and is therefore co-ordinate with morality and not subordinate to it. I do not say that Plotinus would necessarily interpret his own principle in its full breadth ; that would depend on the limits which he might assign to reasonableness of form. In this interpretation he might be influenced by his ascetic tendency ; but there is no room for doubt as to the bearing of his philosophical theory. All that symbolises in sensuous or material form the laws or reasons eternally active in the world has a right, by this theory, to rank as beautiful. On the other hand, his conception of ugliness is defective, if we regard it as a defect to assert that nothing is ugly. For interpreted by modern views of nature, it would come to this. We know of nothing that does not in one way or another symbolise reason. We speak about “ higher ” and “ lower " laws, but we know of nothing in which law is not revealed. If therefore we mean to maintain that real ugliness — ugliness which is not beautiful — can exist, we must set some limit to the idea that all is beautiful which symbolises reason. Whether such a limitation can be maintained, and with it the existence of real ugliness, is a great problem of modern aesthetic. It was at any rate a merit in Plotinus that he stated the question so broadly and cli^arly. By doing so he vastly extended the lecognised province of beauty, in agreement with the need for such an extension which we saw to have been practicailly making itself felt in art and criticism. In all probability, however, he would have classed as formless, ‘ Creuzer, pp. loo-i. * Creuzer, p. 1003. H6 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. in accordance with the enlightened popular feeling even of our own day, which his theory fairly represents, much that trained perception ought to recognise as full of form and beauty, and much again, which may be really ugly, but can- not be strictly called formless. For in reality nothing is form- less. Logically speaking, he has confused the bare negative which is in fact a nonentity, with the positive opposite or contrary. It is not absence of form, but false form — confusion of the forms appropriate to different things and meanings — in which, if anywhere, we must look for real ugliness. Yet all these considerations are refinements, only rendered possible by the broad comparison of beauty and ugliness as representing the rational and irrational, in which for the first time Plotinus brought the whole subject under one compre- hensive point of view, capable of including the diverse forms and deeper sentiments of beauty which the age of transition had been developing. Concrete 7 * As we should anticipate, the identification Criticism. Qf beauty with mere symmetry, or unity in variety, — the limitation which makes aesthetic purely formal — is broken down when the beauty of art ceases to be subordin- ated to the standards of ordinary reality. Plotinus repeatedly protests against the identification of beauty with symmetry ; and although the arguments by which he sustains his protest do not always appear to be sound, nor does he display a very consistent apprehension of any mode beyond that of mere symmetry or harmony in which reason can exhibit itself to sense, yet it is plain that he understood the growing need for a modification of aesthetic theory in this direction. I quote a passage which shows his main argument from feeling and observation.^ “ Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than the symmetry itself, and in this consists its charm. For why is the light of beauty rather on the living face, and only a trace of it on that of the dead, though the countenance be not yet disfigured in the symmetry of its substance ; and why are the more life-like * statues the more beautiful, though the others be more symmetrical ? and why is an uglier living man more beautiful than a statue of a beautiful one, except ^ Ennead.y iv. 7, 22. See Muller, p. 313. * See above ch. iv., p. 45, on Socrates in Xenophon. CRITICISM OF "SYMMETRY.” II7 that this (living beauty) is more desirable, and is so because it is more of the nature of the good ? " And he even seems to have taken up the thought of the Xenophontic Socrates, and insisted that “the portrait painter must aim especially at catch- ing the look of the eye, as the mind reveals itself in it more than in the conformation of the body.” ' This would certainly indicate a peculiar sensitiveness to the effects of painting, which, as Schasler points out, is significant with reference to the new relation which painting and sculpture were destined to assume in the later middle age. Of course “ vitality ” or “ expression ” must be embodied in some kind of symmetry, but as symmetry is a much wider and less definite attribute than vitality and expression, it is plain that we have here a great advance towards concrete aesthetic theory. When however Plotinus supports his denial that beauty can consist in mere symmetry, by the argument that if so, the simple parts of a beautiful whole, such as colour, lightning, the stars, could not be beautiful in themselves, whereas in reality a beautiful whole must have parts which are beautiful separately as well as in combination, he arouses a whole swarm of aesthetic questions — to do which is in itself a great merit — but does not escape serious confusion. To begin with, it is clear that a beautiful whole does not necessarily consist of parts which are beautiful in isolation. Again, al- though, as he alleges, some things which are relatively simple appear to be beautiful even taken by themselves, it is not cer- tain that their beauty falls outside the explanation suggested by Plato for “ pure” sounds and colours, which, of course, how- ever simple, have parts in which their simplicity is manifested. And further, it is not easy to estimate Plotinus’ own explana- tion of the peculiar beauty which he finds in light “ The beauty of colour, which is simple, consists in its overcoming darkness by a principle which is immaterial, and is reason and form.” Whether colour, considered as beautiful, is really simple, and is not rather, gua simple, »merely pleasant, but qua beautiful, suggestive of harmonies and relations ; whether Plotinus the spiritualist is not, like so many spiritualists, fascinated by the idea that an imponderable agent is somehow more akin to mind than heavy matter can be ; and whether, if * See Schasler, i. 246 ii8 HISTORY or iBSTHETIC. light does conquer obscurity by producing lucidity, this im- plies any element of beauty deeper than those involved in order and symmetry, are questions which present themselves at once in dealing with this conception. Leaving these diffi- culties, which it is enough to point out, it must be observed that Plotinus’ devotion to light is connected with the immense importance which Plato’s comparison between the Sun and the Good had in Neo-Platonism, and that from a purely aesthetic point of view he falls behind Aristotle by the comparatively slight attention which he pays to music as a medium of spiritual expression. It was this, we remember, that so strangely and suggestively perverted the mimetic terminology of Aristotle ; music, he observed, had a higher expressive or imitative capacity than the formative arts. And in this con- ception, if freely interpreted, we saw a foreshadowing of the profoundest modern romanticism. For Plotinus, music is of course an audible symbol of inaudible harmonies, but it is beautiful only in a secondary degree as compared with paint- ing, whereas we should have expected that a thinker of his tendency would have developed the suggestion of Aristotle, and recognised music as a pre-eminently spiritual art. If, as seems probable, some superstition about the immaterial affinities of light was the cause of this non-recognition, we have here an example of the law that quasi-poetic imagination, when admitted into philosophy, blinds the intelligence to what is truly of poetic value. The creative impulse of Hellenic philosophy ended with Plotinus. For more than two centuries after his death in 270 A.D. the schools of Athens remained open, but it does not appear that Proclus, who died about forty years before their closing in 529, and was the last considerable Greek philoso- pher, added anything of serious importance to the ideas of Plotinus, which he systematised. We have now traced the history of the Hellenic formulae relating to beauty, and have endeavoured to indicate not only the conditions of their formation and the degrees by which they were stretched and ultimately broken, but also the actual force that was at work in the conprete perception of the beautiful as it first strained and then snapped them. The definite antagonism of the sensuous and the spiritual world — the latter being regarded as something more and other than an intelligible system or better understanding of phenomena — MEDIiBVAL ” AND “ MODERN.” 119 meant the disintegration of ancient thought, and the genesis of what on the great scale of world-history may fairly be called the modern mind. It may be indeed that what we thus distinguish as “modern" will one day be called “mediaeval,” and that we shall learn to date perhaps from Shakespeare or from Goethe the inception of an aesthetic mood which is symbolic like that of the middle age, but without its arbitrary mysticism, and unartificial, like that of classical Greece, but free from its imitative naturalism. For the present however it is enough to note the original growth of that deeper and subtler con- sciousness, which however its antagonisms may be reconciled, can never, having once appeared, be substantially lost to the world, and which must for ever form the ultimate distinction between classical antiquity and all that in the most pregnant sense can be called modern. ® (p- 57 » *)• Observe however in Metrodorus (answer to Posidippus, who wrote in 3rd cent. B.c.) the first definite allusion to ** the charm of nature.” I owe this reference to the kindness of Mr. Mackail. b (p. 90). This judgment seems quite wrong. 1 iieed hardly refer the reader to Mr. Mackail’s History of Latin Literature for a true estimate. ^ (P* 9 *)- On the contrary, the subject, as I learn from Mr. MackaiPs History ^ was often treated in the Alexandrine period. I still think my mention of it not wholly irrelevant d (p. 97). ** god’s house.” If this implies that, e.g., the Parthenon or Propylaea produce an effect of smallness, it is surely quite wrong. They are, in effect^ among the “ biggest ” buildings of the world. e (p. 1 14). Aristotle’s suggestions went further. See Butcher, op, cit., 155 note, and Ar, di Part. A Him. 645 a. 4. CHAPTER VI. SOME TRACES OF THE CONTINUITY OF THE iESTHETIC CON- SCIOUSNESS THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE AGES. It is natural, especially for the Protestant peoples of Europe, to regard the Renaissance as the beginning of modern life. The long struggle for intellectual and political freedom which still gives the tone to our aspirations, appears to us to have had its starting point in the revival of Greek learning, and the awakening of physical science. And we have therefore been too apt to think even of the Renaissance in poetry and for- mative art as a new departure, stimulated from without, and forming portion of a homogeneous development rather into the times that followed, than out of the times that went before. But any such view is coming to be less and less approved by the deepest and most sympathetic criticism ; and thus it will be worth while (i) to put together some indications of a growing tendency in modern thought to pursue the roots of the Renaissance further and further back into the earlier middle age, before (2) attempting a very slight sketch of the intellectual attitude assumed by the mediaeval Church and its greatest thinkers towards formative art and the sense of beauty. Tendency to movement of the Renaissance in extend Benaia- poetry and fine art passed from the productive to towards the critical stage, it was natural that criticism amstian Era. f^^st turn its attention to the later phases of production, which were in many senses nearer to itself J ust as scholarship travelled back to the Hellenic world by way of the Greco-Roman, and was long before it distinguished Zeus and Athene from Jupiter and Minerva, so it would seem as if a;sthetic interest was first attracted by the full-blown and later Renaissance, both in letters, in painting, and in architecture, and only worked backward by degrees to “ Gothic” buildings and early Tuscan painters. We all know the beautiful passage in Goethe’s autobiography,* in which he supports the noble * Wahrhtitu. Dichtung, Werke, 17, 347-8. THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT. I3I paradox, “ What youth desires, old age abounds in,” by his having lived to enjoy the awakened interest of others in Gothic architecture, the study of which had fascinated him in his youth. Tbe art lectures of our own Academicians show the need of a similar retrogression.* We find in them, indeed, some slight references to Cimabue, because of Vasari’s con- spicuous mention of him, but hardly a word of Giotto, and not a word of Botticelli or Fra Angelico. The Caracci’s, on the other hand, are continually in the writers' minds, just as Lessing’s criticism was first directed to the Gallicising poets of his own day. The brilliancy of the first years of the sixteenth century seems to have marked that period as the true point of departure, and attention was given by preference rather to what came after it than to what went before. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 furnished a conveniently definite reason, and in some degree a real cause, to which this great effect could be attributed ; and so the term Renaissance in its narrowest acceptation indicates the influence of Greek studies and antiquities on art and letters, an influence which had, however, in fact begun before the latter half of the fifteenth century, to which it is usually ascribed. Because of this usage, the word has often to-day a disparaging connotation with reference to the history of art and architecture, which is apt to perplex the student who interprets it more generally. Fre-Rapbaeut* i- The present century has seen this tendency paiBtinj. reversed, at least in England, by the aesthetic movement, of which the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was a symbol, but which acted in conjunction with many funda- mental impulses of the age, and, in short, with the whole principle of evolutionary science and history. It is quite plain that this general movement, which includes a strong bias against the assumption of purely extraneous causes for any development within a society, hais shifted the centre of our interest in Italian formative art to a point rather before than after the close of the fifteenth century, and has pushed back its further limit to the first signs of chqnge in the practice of painters, that is to say to the middle of the thirteenth century. As for architecture, we shall see directly that in it the later Renaissance may now be said to form the nearer frontier of our interest, while the remoter boundary has gone back to the ' Barry, Opie, Fuseli, between 1790 1810. 122 HISTORY OF /SSTHETIC very threshold of the earliest middle s^e. But when this more comprehensive scope is given to our care for the Renaissance, the term itself has lost its narrow reference to the revival of Greek letters in the fifteenth century, and has been extended in conformity with its literal import to the whole movement and aspiration revealed in Dante and Giotto and their successors. ce^yftwon “• This being so, however, the principle is con- uteratnre. ceded that the European movement known as the Renaissance was not purely dependent on stimulation from without, and we are driven to trace its genesis yet further back than the time of Dante. We cannot refuse to see in the early French stories written as we have them during the thirteenth century, but older no doubt in their origin and circulation, a Renaissance within the middle age,' on which the signs of the new spirit are distinctly impressed. Mr. Pater’s quotation from TAe Friendship of Amis and Amile should be read in the beautiful setting he has fur- nished for it* by those who desire to realise the many sidedness of the romantic sentiment embodied in these matin songs of modern Europe. We notice in them on the one hand the tenderness and sensitiveness of romanticism, and more es- pecially its delight in beautiful workmanship, the carved wooden cups of Amis and Amile playing the part almost of persons in the story ; and on the other hand we are struck by the outburst of passionate rebellion against a dogma, once spiritual, but now grossly material, and hostile to human feeling. Nothing is more extraordinary in view of our common notions about the Dark Ages, than the audacity alike of sentiment and of speculation that we meet with inside their bounds. One famous outburst of such audacity I think it well to reproduce from the story of Aucassin et Nicolette. It is the passage to which Mr. Pater refers as sounding a note of rebellion too strident for his pages. Aucassin is threatened with exclusion from heaven, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. “ You will never,” the adviser concludes, “ enter into Para- dise. ^ I am following, of course, non passibus cequis^ the delightful study in Mr. Pater’s Renaissance called “Two Early French Stories.” * Renaissance^ Essay i. ABELARD. 123 “ In Paradise what have I to do?” is Aucassin’s answer. “ I do not seek to enter there, but only to have Nicolettej my sweet love, whom I love so. None go to Paradise but those whom I will tell you. There go the old priest and the halt and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before the altars and in the old crypts, and those that are clothed in old shabby cloaks and old rags naked and barefoot and sansculotte, who die of hunger and poverty and cold and misery. These f o to Paradise ; with these I have nought to do. But to hell will go ; for to hell go the fair scholar, and the fair knight who dies in tournays and noble wars, and the good squire and the free man. With them I will go. There too go the beauti- ful courteous ladies, who have two or three lovers, with their husbands, and there go the gold and silver and the pfecious furs, and there go the harper and the minstrel, and the kings of this world. With these I will go, only I must have with me my sweet love, Nicolette,” When we recall that these words were probably written in the lifetime of Thomas Aquinas, who was Dante’s guide in theology, we begin to understand how deep rooted in the life of the age were the contrasts of dogma and romance which amaze us in the Inferno. “ Le bel clerc ” — these words sound like an echo of the too famous personal history which so tragically embodied this antagonism. Abelard. iii. For a little further back, in the first half of the twelth century, lies the troubled career of Abelard, whom we are here to consider, not as a philosopher, but as the actor in a real tragedy, which must have deeply affected the feeling of the age, and as the writer of the letters to Heloise, and of songs in the vernacular which the Paris students sang. In the actual incidents of his fate, as in the mediaeval legend of Tannhauser,^ we see no mere vulgar aberration, but a rebellion, relatively justifiable, against conditions and ideas which man- kind Weis not destined permanently to endure. The claim upon the sympathy of the age, which is embodied in the divine forgiveness as represented in the Tannhauser legend, must also, one would think, have been recognised in Abelard. It has been well observed* that Dante, by omitting so familiar a name from the Divina Commedia, almost seems to refuse to judge him. ' The comparison is drawn from Mr Pater’s Renaissance. * Mr. Pater, la 124 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. Arshitaotnn Jv. We have now traced back the signs of the “ Renaissance ” spirit to the beginning of the Century. twelfth century, before the sculptures of Poitiers or of Chartres, which are perhaps the earliest indications of a revival in the higher formative crafts, as contrasted with mere architectural decoration. In these higher crafts of sculpture and painting, as also in the Highest of all arts, the art of poetry, it appears that a long period of barrenness or rigidity preceded the development of the twelfth and later centuries. For this we shall in part be able to account when we discuss the attitude of the Church. But the roots of the Renaissance must be pursued further still. For we must again insist on what was alluded to in the last chapter, that the age of beautiful architecture, while it includes the centuries of which we bave just been speaking, extends upwards in an unbroken continuity from them to the time of Justinian. In the later Renaissance, on the other hand, the tradition is severed, and whatever the merits or defects of the architecture that followed, it no longer springs organically from that which went before. It is quite natural that the great artistic craft which is rooted in necessity and does not intentionally represent imaginative ideas, should be the one to maintain itself through the inrush of uncultured peoples into Christendom and through the dis- putes and misunderstandings of a creed, prone to the heresy that the spirit is essentially hostile to the flesh. Including those crafts of decoration which do not necessarily deal with the human figure, and therefore escape questionings aroused by anthropomorphism, architecture was well able to represent and carry forward the impulse of freedom and individuality, which was one day to find a fuller expression in the achievements of painting, music and poetry. I have at this point no alternative but to supplement the quotation which I made in the last chapter, with reference to the architecture and decoration of the Roman decadence, by others from the same author,^ dealing with the early days of that “ modern,” or mediaeval architecture which sprang from it. “ Spalato was built about 323 A.D., St. Sophia in 530. More than 200 years are between them, by no means fertile ^ Mr. Wm. Morris, in Lectures on Art, Macmillan, 1883. Cf. Prof. Middleton, Encyel. Brit,, art. “ Sculpture.” THE " TRUE RENAISSANCE." *25 of beautiful or remarkable buildings, but St. Sophia once built, the earth began to blossom with beautiful buildings, and the thousand years that lie between the date of St. Sophia and the date of St Peter’s at Rome may well be called the building age of the world. But when those years were over, in Italy at least, the change Wcis fully come ; and as a symbol of that change there stood on the site of the great mass of history and art, which was once called the Basilica of St. Peter, that new Church of St. Peter which still curses the mightiest city of the world — the very type, it seems to me, of pride and tyranny, of all that crushes out the love of art in simple people, and makes art a toy of little estimation for the idle hours of the rich and cultivated.” ^ “ But, one thing came of it [of freedom in the realm of art at least] in those earlier days — an architecture pure in its principles, reasonable in its practice, and beautiful to the eyes of all men, even the simplest.” — “ It was a matter of course that the art of pattern designing should fully share in the exaltation of the master art. Now at last, and only now,* it began to be really delight- ful in itself ; good reason why, since now at last the mind of a man, happy in his work, did more or less guide all hands that wrought it. No beauty in the art has ever surpassed the beauty of those, its first days of joy and freedom, the days of gain without loss — the time of boundless hope. I say of gain without loss ; the qualities of all the past styles which had built it up are there, with all that it has gained of new. The great rolling curves of the Roman Acanthus have not been forgotten, but they have had life, growth, variety, and refinement infused into them ; the clean-cut accuracy and justness of line of one side of Greek ornament have not been forgotten, nor the straying wreath-like naturalism of the other side of it ; but the first has gained a crisp sparkling richness and freedom and suggestion of nature which it had lacked before ; and the second, which was apt to be feeble and languid, has gained a knitting-up of its lines into strength, and an interest in every curve, which make it like the choice parts of the vefy growths of nature. Other gain it has of richness and mystery, the most necessary of all the qualities of pattern work, that without which, indeed. ' Lectures on Art^ p. 131. * I understand the writer to be referring, in the first instance, to the decora* tion of St. Sophia. See Prof. Middleton, l.c. 126 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. it must be kept in the strictly subordinate place which the scientific good taste of Greece allotted to it." The writer goes on to point out that Byzantine art rather made the character of what we call Eastern art, than derived its own character from what Extern art then was, although the East had much to do with the new life of this which he calls the “ true Renais- sance.” “ But surely,” he continues, “ when we have sought our utmost for the origins of all the forms of that great body of the expression of men’s thoughts which 1 have called modern art (you may call it Gothic art if you will, little as the Goths dealt with it), when we have sought and found much, we shall still have to confess that there is no visible origin for the thing that gave life to those forms. All we can say is, that when the Roman tyranny grew sick, when that recurring curse of the world, a dominant race, began for a time to be shaken from its hold, men began to long for the freedom of art ; and that even amid the confusion and rudeness of a time when one civilisation was breaking up that another might be born of it, the mighty impulse which this longing gave to the ex- pression of thought created a glorious art, full of growth and hope, in the only form which at such a time art could take — architecture to wit — which of all the forms of art is that which springs direct from popular impulse, from the partnership of all men, great and little, in worthy and exalting aspirations. So was modern or Gothic art created, and never till the time of that death or cataleptic sleep of the so-called Renaissance, did it forget its origin.” Here, we are to observe, the art of the sixth century a.d. is referred to as the sign of “ the true Renaissance,” which does not mean a rebirth of “ classical ” forms, but rather a rebirth of the human spirit in a vesture entirely new, though woven out of the robes it had laid aside. We must bear in mind, however, that great works of individual origination in the ex- pressive arts are not to be found during the six centuries which we have just traversed so lightly ; and although it is not hard to explain this phenomenon, yet it cannot be explained away, christiaii Art V. But we may go at least one step further. “ As if in anticipation of the sixteenth century, the oenturiea. Church was becoming humanistic, in a best and earliest Renaissance.” This saying of the same writer ’ who ^ Mr. Pater, Marius the Epicurean^ voL ii. 141. BEFORE CONSTANTINE. 137 pointed us to the French or Provencal Renaissance of early romance, refers to the second century of our era — the minor ‘ peace of the Church ” under the Antonines. At this time, it is suggested, before those conflicts of body and soul which preceded or characterised the later “ peace of the Church ” under Constantine, she was “ truer than perhaps she ever would be again to that element of profound serenity in the soul of her founder, which reflected the eternal goodwill of God to man, ' in whom,’ according to the oldest version of the angelic message, ‘ He is well pleased !’ ” The signs which indicate some such frame of mind in the Church before Constantine appear to be : — a. The allusions from which an early development of litur- gical music, analogous to that described by Augustine as recently introduced at Milan, may be inferred to reach back, though in less ceremonial forms,' to New Testament times. b. The remains of early Christian painting in the cata- combs, of which some part may belong to very early years, though the more complete frescoes probably come down to the fourth century. What is remarkable in these oldest relics of Christian art is in the first place the complete adoption of a simple symbolism, resting partly on Scripture and partly on natural allegory, in which the cross, the lamb, the fish,* the stag (after the Psalm, “ As the hart panteth "), and the phoenix or peacock, all stand directly for ideas belonging to the faith, symbols such as these having for unlettered minds an extraordinary power of comfort and fascination, when they have become the vehicles of a common experience and a common hope. And in the second plac^, as pictorial capacity increases among the Christians, there arises the habit of repre- senting scenes from the life of Jesus, never in childhood nor in suffering, but always as a godlike man in some happy or triumphant activity, as the Good Shepherd (with an echo of Hermes), or in the entrance into Jerusalem, or even before Pilate ; or again, as the teacher among His disciples, or under the form of Orpheus, who also overcame death, and tamed the ' The Council of I^odicea, 367 a.d., restricted singing in church to the trained choir. Carriere, iii. 94 ff. ® The first letters of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour, form the Greek word for fish. 128 HISTORY OF jESTHETIC. fiercest creatures, in a Phrygian cap, playing the lyre among wild beasts. ‘ The hymns and sacred poetry of the early Church do not appear to have attained independent poetical rank,* but, beginning with some verses quoted or written by Clement of Alexandria in the end of the second century, and going on through Nazianzen in the fourth century and Synesius in the fifth, they evince * a completely new force and freedom in, so to speak, taking possession of the universe with all its strength and majesty, as something that shares, in its degree, man’s relation to the Creator. This relation does not appear to be either ai^umentatively or fantastically conceived ; it is rather directly and simply felt, as the content of a faith and a ground for prayer. The Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Psalms, no doubt had a profound influence on this mood and its ex- pression ; but the doctrine of the incarnation, which seems generally to be near at hand in these hymns, immensely strengthens w'hat I have ventured to call the sense of posses- sion or proprietorship which replaces for the Christian the Judaic sense of inaccessibility or remoteness in the Creator. In this feeling, which is very strongly marked in the Synoptic Gospels, we unquestionably have one and that the most fundamental note of the Christian attitude towards beauty. But yet Christian art had far to go and much to suffer before it could realise this aspiration of its early days. It is worth while to adduce two quotations from the prose literature of the fourth century, which show first the pro- found sense of unity with the world that survived down to that time among Christians ; and secondly, this same unity just beginning to rend itself in the long struggle which was probably unavoidable if its full depth was ever to be realised. Gregory of Nyssa writes : “When I see every hilltop, every valley, every plain covered with fresh sprung grass, and then the various array of the trees, and at my feet the lilies, doubly furnished by nature, both with pleasant scent and with beauty * See an elaborate treatment of early Christianity in all its aesthetic aspect* in Carriere, iii., 77-138, and cf. for the catacombs. Prof. Middleton, in Encycl. Brit., “ Mural Decoration.” * It is now thought that Gregory of Nazianzus was not the author of the Euripidean tragedy on “ the suflering Christ,” which used to be ascribed to him. See his life, Encycl. Brit. * I judge from the translations in Carriere, l.e. SYMPATHY WITH NATURE. 129 of colour ; when in the distance I behold the sea, to which the wandering cloud leads the way, my mind is seized by a melan- choly which is not without happiness ; and when in autumn the fruits [corn ?] disappear, the leaves fall and the boughs are left bare, we are absorbed in the thought of the eternal and continuously recurring change in the accord of the marvellous forces of nature. Whoever apprehends this with the intelli- gent eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man compared with the greatness of the universe.” And Chrysostom : “ When you look at gleaming buildings, and the aspect of colonnades allures your eye, then turn at once to the vault of heaven and to the free plains in which herds graze at the water’s brink. Who does not despise all the creations of art when at dawn in the stillness of his heart he admires the rising sun, as it sheds its golden light over the earth ; or, when resting by a spring in the deep grass or under the dark shade of thick-leaved trees, he feasts his eye on the far distance vanishing in the haze ?” I do not think that we can be mistaken in saying that these passages show a sympathy with nature which is quite of a modern type. But in both of them this feeling is beginning to turn against the sense of worth in man and his productions, and so doing to cut at its own root. Nothing could be more pregnant than this opposition, more especially in the second passage, where it is specifically directed against architecture, the non-imitative art. On the one hand it emphasises unmis- takably a new attitude of Eesthetic perception to external nature, the like of which we have not found in any Hellenic or Greco- Roman writer, but on the other hand it betrays a faint shadow of that hostility to artificial beauty which maimed the higher imaginative arts in the middle age, and in doing so, deadened in the end man’s sensibility even to natural loveliness. There is ground, then, for the suggestion which finds the earliest Renaissance in the earliest age of peace experienced by the Christian Church after it becanic a completed organ- ism ; * and it is not to be denied that the Founder of Christi- anity* looked out upon the external world with free and ^ See Marius the Epicurean^ ii. 135. * I doubt whether such disinterested apprehension of floral beauty — so free from moralising or allegory — as that of the text, “ Consider the lilies of the fleld,” can be found outside, or prior to, the Christian intelligence. K 130 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. friendly eyes, or that the ultimate tendency of this religion is to make man feel that the world and he himself are parallel expressions of one and the same Divinity. Necessity of at But yet there seems to be another side to Interval of this question. The half- Hellenic cheerfulness, in Austerity, gy^jg^ts and treatment, of the catacomb-paintings, the abounding grace and force of some early Christian sculp- tures,^ and the naive devotion of the early hymns and sacred odes, could scarcely perhaps have led by direct development to so great a range and depth of characterisation, as that which reveals itself in the twelfth century and after. The later dogmatic and ascetic tendency may no doubt be said to have laid fetters on the highest uses of art ; but was it not necessary that the opposition between the spirit and the flesh should be pushed to the furthest point, both within the realm of art, and between art and dogma, in order that the entire gamut of expression might be mastered, and that the arduous- ness of the task, to represent all that there is in man, might not be understated ? If the God-like or heroic Christ had never passed into the man of sorrows, if crucifixions and martyr- doms and the forms of emaciated ascetics had never been brought within the range of representation, would not an element have been wanting to the complex expressiveness of Botticelli and Leonardo, and to the modern feeling, which is our peculiar pride, for a beauty as wide as life ? And if no party in the Church had maintained, and no Council had decided, that “ Christ in His glorified humanity was . . . too exalted to be figured by human art in an earthly material, after the analogy of any other human body,” ® would there have existed, when imagination at length came to its rights, the full sense of mystery which Raphael, for example, em- bodied in the Divine child of the Sistine Madonna."* It is said that the Christian painters attained a mastery over the expression of the face long before they could deal adequately with the figure, whereas with Greek sculptors the order was the reverse of this. Such a contrast, which is certainly char- acteristic, only applies to the Christian art of a later age, and not to that of the first four centuries. But none the less it is true that the re-birth of humanity • Carriere, iii. 1 14. Prof. Middleton in Encycl, Brit., art. “ Sculpture." * Council of 754, not oecumenical. Encycl. Brit,, art “ Image-worship." christxam dualism. *3* beg£ui with the Christian era, or rather, as we said in the last chapter, long before it ; and the apparent aberrations of the later middle age were but necessary grades in the process which vindicated the full breadth and intensity of the human ideal. inteueotiui 2, The profound conception of Plotinus, which finally destroyed the theoretical restriction of notinni. beauty to formal symmetry and of art to imita- tion, was essentially maintained — whether or no in direct inheritance from its author — by the intellectual consciousness of Christendom. It was, as we have seen, only an application of the thought of Plato, for which everything visible or material was a sign or counterpart of something invisible or immaterial. In a dialogue * of Scotus Erigena, who might be called the last Neo-Platonist and the first Scholastic,* the “ teacher” says, “Consider whether these local and temporal recurrences of the parts of this visible universe are devoid of a certain mystery or not,” to which the “disciple” replies, “ I could not readily affirm that they are devoid of mystery ; for there is nothing, as I think, of visible and corporeal objects which does not signify somewhat incorporeal and [purely] intelligible.” Scholastic disputes about the logical or metaphysical existence of universals do not touch this fundamental conviction, which, formulated by Plato after the great age of Hellenic art, sank deep into the European intellect under the influence of the so-called decadence, including the birth of Christianity, and governed the modern perception of beauty till rationalised by the later Renaissance. For the time, therefore, the consciousness of Christendom was dualistic, as opposed to the naturalistic monism of the ordinary Hellenic creed before Plato. But the Christian dualism was only the outward sign of an arduous struggle to realise a higher or spiritual monism. From the first and throughout history a sense of reconciliation was active in the Christian faith, how- ever militant. Thus the slight indications of the* mediaeval attitude to- wards beauty, which are all that can be dealt with here, appear to indicate a remarkable circuit of theory, beginning with a special sympathy for nature as opposed to the works of * De Divisione Mundi, § 3, ninth century. • Art. “ Scholasticism,” Entyd Brit. 132 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC man in ihe Christian successors of Plotinus (in the same age which adopted evolutionary monism as the root of orthodox theology), passing through a phase of hostility to the higher and more human arts in the destruction of Pag^ism and the iconoclastic controversy, and ending with a complete recogni- tion of a more significant beauty as the manifestation of the Divine both tnrough art and nature in the age of St. Francis, St. Thomas, Dante, and Giotto. This whole circuit is determined, as constantly happens with dualistic theories, by a shifting location in empirical reality of the two factors which constitute the dualism. The underlying conception is that nature and art, belonging to the visible * universe, are beautiful if and in as far as they worthily symbolise the Divine power and goodness, and con- sequently do not appeal to sensuous interest or desire. But their respective fitness for this purpose is differently judged at different times, and the course of this judgment reminds us in some degree of Plato’s speculation, especially when nature is reckoned as nearer to the creative original than art, when art is condemned as unable to portray divinity, or when all beauty, whether of nature or of art, is rejected as a mere stimulus to sense. There seems always, however, to be in the background, more positively than in Plato, at least the conditional admission that material beauty is divine, if rightly and purely seen. From Bmanauon !• We should note, to begin with, that in the to Evolution, fourth century, some two generations after the death of Plotinus, the great step from emanation to evolu- tion was irrevocably made by Christian dogma in the settle- ment of the Homoousian dispute. Whether this idea is or is not in the sense of the Synoptic Gospels, it certainly marks the final and essential abandonment of heathenism, and the climax to which Platonism and Neo- Platonism had gradually been approximating. There can be developed, it affirms, out of the one supreme principle of the world, a progressive and active content, which does not lose anything, nor become ^ The extraordinary prominence given to the sense of sight in this anti- thesis from Plato downwards necessarily governs our terminology, and theory has sometimes, as we shall see in St. Thomas, suffered from this prominence, which arises both from obvious reasons in the nature of the sense, and prob- ably also from the metaphysical convenience of analogies founded on it M well as from historical causes. DISTRUST OF ART. *33 secondary, by the fact of this development. However verbal or pedantic this may appear to us to-day, it is, if contrasted with the ideas of the greatest Greeks, excepting perhaps Aristotle, a necessary protest against a pessimistic limitation. It denies the rule of progress to be that- the first is best, the second a little less perfect, and the third more imperfect still. DuallBm and Love ii. And thus we saw how in this fourth century ofNatur*. Chiysostom and Gregory of Nyssa, like the early Christian hymn-writers, fully recognised the beauty of material nature as the direct work and symbol of Divinity, and even accented this recognition by a tendency to dis- parage, in comparison, the works of man. As early, indeed, AS the year 306 a.d. a Spanish Synod ^ had decided that ‘ pictures ought not to be in a church, lest that which is worshipped and adored be painted on walls,” and the genesis of iconoclasm goes bacK in part to the Decalogue and the Judaic element in Christianity. In the language of philo- sophy this tendency of the fourth century a.d. means that the dualism between sense and spirit is first asserting itself in antagonism to what is most plainly of human origin, as in the modern sentiment that ‘ God made the country and man made the town.” Audaciously as this antithesis inverts the true relation of things, it performs a temporary service to culture by forcing into prominence the charm of external nature. But such an effect, if isolated, must be transient ; a dualism which condemns the beauty fixed in art must soon threaten the sense of a beauty perceivable in nature. Before this comes to pass, however, the momentary situation leaves a permanent result in Augustine’s account of beauty, dealing, as is natural from his theological position, rather with the world than with fine art, which he, like others of his time. was beginning to distrust.* AuguBttna early life, he tells us,® he had written on " Beauty of books on the Beautiful and Fit, about which writ- univor-e. ings he now no longer cared, nor knew whether ^ Synod of Elvira. Art. “ Image-worship,” Encycl. Brit. * Augustine lived 354-430 a.d. He expressed disapproval of looking for Christ on painted walls rather than in the written word. There is a letter ascribed to Eusebius of Caesarea, early fourth century, addressed to the sister of Constantine, refusing a request for a picture of Christ as unlawful, and say- ing that he had taken away from a lady friend pictures of Paul and Christ which ■he possessed, , art. “ Image-worship.” * iv. 13. 134 HISTORY OF iBSTHETIC. they existed or not. His former interest, however, sufficed to furnish him with a formal doctrine of beauty, which is indi- cated by the above-mentioned title, and does not in general go beyond the conception of symmetrical relations between parts as belonging to a whole. What is peculiar to him and constitutes an advance that merits more attention than it re- ceives, is the application of this view, specially supported by the analogy of fine art, to the universe as a whole considered as containing evil or ugliness (deformitas). By reason of this application, due of course to a theological motive, his view receives a deeper content than the easygoing provi- dential creed of Cicero, which in general expression it very greatly resembles. The variety correlative to unity in ancient formal aesthetic is deepened by Augustine into the opposition of contraries. This he considers to be essentially included within the sym- metry of the universe, eis in a beautiful song,' or in the anti- theses of rhetoric, or in the shadows of a picture, which do not make it ugly if rightly placed. Poisons, dangerous animals, and the like, all have their due place in the world, and so far are elements in its beauty. We have here nothing to do with the question whether this bold treatment of sin and suffering can be justified theologically ; but its aesthetic bearing, which in Augustine’s hands is very decidedly empha- sised, brings us at once up to the level of modern popular theory with reference to ugliness, such as we find implied in poetical or orthodox sentiment to-day. The essence of this theory is to recognise the ugly as a subordinate element in the beautiful, to which it serves as a foil,* contributing how- ever on the whole to an effect which is harmonious or sym- metrical quite or almost in the traditional sense. And it has the merit of attacking the problem of ugliness more directly than ^ Ctv. £>et] xi. 1 8, 23; xxii. 19. I quote the title of xi. 18. “De pulchritudine universitatis, quae per ordinationem Dei etiam ex contrariorum fit oppositione luculentior.” I do not know of what kind the “ antitheta ” in a song would be ; I suspect it of simply meaning the responses as sung by the two sides of the choir under Ambrose at Milan. In that case, the com- parison from music has not the modernism of a reference to discord. Augus- tine’s modernism in one doctrine, that of the certainty implied in doubt, “ Si dubitat, cogitat,” etc., has been mentioned above, p. 78. 9 «« v^y rushed the discord in, but that harmony should be prized.” — Browning’s “ Abt Vogler.” COLOVK Atro SYMMETRY. *35 any Greek could attempt, more directly than Plutarch, who excluded the ugly from art except as an evidence of artistic skill, and than Plotinus, unless we interpret his view of the formless so as to give it a positive and not merely a negative bearing. It belongs to an intermediate stage between the abstract and the concrete perception of beauty. Symmetry, it admits, may be enriched by contrast, but symmetry and not characteristic ekpressiveness is still the ruling principle. It is a note of this popular view to insist on the small quanti- tative proportion in which it alleges the ugly to exist relatively to the beautiful, and this popular note we find in Augustine as in modern sentiment. But this is not really a consideration of any speculative importance, and tends to confuse the sub- ordination of ugliness to beauty as a factor, with the over- powering of our sense of ugliness by the greater mass of the beautiful — which, if that were all, would be a mere inaccuracy in our perceptions. There is historical interest in the stress laid by Augustine on the element of colour as a part of beauty in addition to symmetry. We saw that when Socrates conversed about beauty with Parrhasius, the painter was familiar with colour and symmetry as features in the beautiful, although Socrates’ account of expression was new to him.* The same two terms are adduced by Plotinus in the forefront of his discussion as representing the aesthetic tradition which he censures as in- adequate ; but the strange thing is, that in spite of this, they descended as an adequate account of the beautiful to Thomas Aquinas through the pseudo- Dionysius,* who has very much in common with Plotinus. Here, too, in Augustine, about the contemporary of the pseudo- Dionysius, we find them occupying the same unquestioned place,® as though the con- spicuous reference of Plotinus to these terms had had more permanent effect than his criticism of them. I transcribe a passage from Augustine which illustrates this point, and also has an interest from containing a thought which reappears in Dante’s Paradiso.* “ The beauty of any material object is ‘ Xen. Memor., 3, lo. * Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, secunda pars secundse partis Sect. 145, which quotes Dionysius by name. * Civ. Dei, xi. 22, “moles” mass, in contrast, to symmetry, and Augustine’s view that sise is indifferent in beauty, also remind us of Plotinus. * De. Civ. Dei. xxii. 19. 136 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. congruence of parts together with a certain sweetness^ of colour. . . . But how great will be the sweetness of colour when the righteous shall shine forth like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” BnpprwBion of iv. Augustine, as we saw just now, allowed to perish as trivial his early writings on the Beau- tiful and the Fit, which we should have valued so highly. Yet his whole view of the universe had a strongly aesthetic tinge, and we must be careful how we interpret as a datum of the history of aesthetic, the violent suppression of Paganism which took place in his lifetime by the edicts of Theodosius, “ with the loud and unanimous applause of the Christian world.” * The widespread destruction of temples with their decorations, and their abandonment to decay, tells of religious hostility combined with brutal indifference to art ; but we must remember that the Parthenon, though disfigured in the fifth century by its conversion into a church, was hope- lessly ruined only by a siege twelve hundred years later ; and the Pantheon, having been preserved at first, we must sup- pose, by peculiar favour of the authorities, owed its subse- quent immunity to consecration in the sixth century.* There is a certain pathos attaching to the fact that the roll of Olympic victors closes in 393 a.d. with the name of an Armenian, after a reputed continuance of more than eleven centuries, while the Pheidian statue of Zeus was carried off to Constantinople — a step which shows some sense of its value on the part of the Christians, though we lament that it perished by fire in 476 A.D. The suppression of Paganism, then, w’as in the first place not universally carried out with equal rigour ; and in the second place, though indicating the deepest ignorance, and indifference to the value of art, did not mainly arise from the same fanatical repugnance to artistic representation which subsequently revealed itself in the iconoclastic controversy. There was indeed in the fourth century already a rising tide of opposition even to Christian art, but, for the time, the censures recorded only serve to measure the still increasing employ- * “ Suavitas.” In the clause following those which I quote “ suavitas ” is replaced by “ claritas,” the term used 800 years later by Thomas Aquinas. * Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, ch. xxviii. See Gibbon’s and Milman’s notes on the attitude of St. Augustine, from whom conflicting passages are quoted. * Gibbon, l.c. GREGORY ON THE USE OF ART. 137 inent of painting and mosaic on the walls of churches. And it is plain that the austerity of the later peace of the church ^ was now beginning to assert itself positively within the sphere of art as well as negatively against it ; for stories of martyr- doms were painted on the walls of basilicas,* and somewhat later even the passion and death of Christ were depicted,* contrary to earlier custom. Along with this change in subjects there grew up, it would seem, the Byzantine manner of representation, gloomy and rigid in itself, but powerful by forcing a new element upon art, which was one day to be assimilated as a new element in beauty. Bigniflcaiice of V. But the same restless dualism — restless be- iconociasm. cause in principle a monism — which in the vis- ible world preferred nature to art, and in art itself preferred the absence of what had hitherto been felt as beauty — in both these aspects repeating the thought of Plato —was destined to go still further in Plato’s track, and turn its distrust of the visible both against the whole of pictorial art, and against the whole beauty of the visible world. In the time of Gregory the Great (sixth century), the bishop of Marseilles * ordered the removal and destruction of all sacred images within his diocese, in consequence of which violent action Gregory laid down the distinction that it is one thing to worship a picture, and another to learn from the language of a picture what that is which ought to be worshipped. What those who can read learn by means of writing, the uneducated learn by means of looking at a picture — that, therefore, ought not to have been destroyed which had been placed in the churches, not for worship, but solely for instructing the minds of the ignorant. The same moderate line which Gregory adopted was afterwards taken by Charlemagne, and became the rule of the Western Church, which however, we are told, was by no means free from iconoclastic opinion. The didactic value and mission of art has partly been discussed in connection with Plato and Aristotle, and though in ^trict form it falls out- * See p. 127 above. * Arts. “ Image worship,” and “ Mural Decoration,” Encycl. Brit. Paulinas of Nola (d. 431 A.D.) had subjects from Christian history painted as a means of instruction. * As in the church of San Clemente, at Rome. * Art. “ Image-worship,” Encycl. Brit. 138 HISTORY OF iCSTHETIC side aesthetic, yet in substance it affects important issues regarding the comparative position of art in literary and in illiterate ages, and if only for this reason will have to be dealt with below. The actual iconoclastic controversy arose and ran its course within the Eastern Church, covering, with intervals, a period of about 120 years, from 726 to after 842, and it is worth while to note from an aesthetic point of view, the probability that the emperor Leo the Isaurian, whose edict against images began it, had been influenced by intercourse with Jews and Arabs.' The high-water mau'k of the agitation was the Council of Constantinople in 754, attended by 338 bishops, but never recognised as oecumenical, which determined that “ Christ in His glorified humanity, though not incorporeal, was yet exalted above all the limits and defects of a sensuous nature, too exalted therefore to be figured by human art in an earthly material after the analogy of any other human body,” and pronounced anathema on all who attempted to express by visible colours the form of the Logos in His incarnation, and on all who delineate dumb and lifeless figures of the saints, which could never serve any profitable end.* And although the Eastern Church after 842 returned to a theoretical position much like that of Gregory and Charlemagne, yet the Byzanr tine manner of painting maintained itself in Italy till the twelfth century, and survives in Athos till the present day, under the influence, it would seem, of a distinctly ascetic theory and code of rules.® In this dispute we see yet another phase of the shifting dualism between the spirit and the flesh. Reinforced by the extra-mundane monotheism of Jews and Mahometans, the faith in a spiritual order now turns decisively, as in Plato, against all sensuous presentations as essentially inadequate to that order ; and attains the result of recording a protest, like that of Plato, that in so far as to represent means to copy something that can be copied, so far the spiritual, as such, ^ Gibbon, ch. 49. * Art. “ Image-worship,” EncycL Brit, * Cf. the alleged remark of a Greek monk on some pictures of Titian, which he had ordered and refused to accept : “Your scandalous pictures stand quite out from the canvas ; they are as bad as statues.'" — Gibbon, ch. 49 note. “ Images,"" it seems, down to the ninth century, mean pictures and mosaics. Sculptures are only mentioned in the ninth century and later. PRACTICAL TRUTH OF THE DECISION. *39 cannot be represented in a sensuous form. The difference is that now the conception of symbolism is in the air, and the whole problem is therefore on the level to which Plato raised it, and not on that from which he started. The “ other ” or spiritual world of which he was concerned to demonstrate the reality, is now (however crudely apprehended) the one object of faith to the popular mind ; and the deceitfulness of sensuous forms is no longer the conclusion of the solitary thinker, but the premiss fanatically urged by a section of the common crowd. Therefore the weight of the problem is thrown in a new direction ; not towards exalting the value of the “other” world, but towards re-establishing or maintaining its cohesion with this. And though Gregory the Great was indifferent to learning, and Charlemagne could hardly write, yet the logic of facts and the experience of ages drove them into a solution which Plato, just because he helped to make it possible, only recognised when at his very best. For the position of these authorities, who could not be expected to talk the language of philosophy, and who were conditioned in their policy by all sorts of passions and necessities affecting the Church of their respective times — which after all were necessities of human life — may fairly be paraphrased thus : “We know that pictures cannot be copies of an essence which is inaccessible to sensuous perception, and therefore they are not to be worshipped ; ^ but they can teach, because visible things can have a meaning ; and therefore pictures are not to be rejected, but are to be retained as means of instruction and as aids to memory.” In aesthetic philosophy such a view is incorrect, or incorrectly formulated. But the effect of art is not limited by the grounds which the powers that be allege for permitting it to exist, and in the widest historical sense, though not in the strict language of philosophy, there is no doubt whatever that art is the instructress of peoples, Tha System of vi. It was in the ninth century, just about the scotM Butrena. ^t which the controversy regarding pictorial art in sacred buildings was decided bc^h in the East and the West, that a really considerable thinker formulated mediaeval idecis in a complete system, and, as a part of it, laid down the place and nature of material beauty. The position of this * “ Es hilft nichts, unsere Knie beugen wir doch nicht mehr.” Hegel, AestA. L 132, describing the inevitable modem distinction between art and religion. 140 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. philosopher, Scotus Erigena, from whom I have already^ quoted a typical statement of mediaeval symbolism, is one of the cir- cumstances that make it hard to know precisely where we are to look for the Dark Ages. We are apt to think of them as a prolonged period, ending with the Renaissance, in which disputants, ignorant alike of science and of real philosophy, wrangled about logical forms that were in truth subordinate to theological doctrines. But we saw above that our concep- tion of the Renaissance is leading us to trace it ever further back ; and on the other hand the modern estimate of Erigena tends to throw the origin of Scholasticism proper somewhat later than his lifetime. Scholasticism proper, then, is in fact the beginning of the end, and coincides with the two or three centuries of definite intellectual advance that preceded the life of Dante, assuming that \ve refuse to attach importance to It after his day. But if Scholasticism — the conscious adjustment of relations between philosophy and theology — marked the close of the Dark Ages, the speculation of Erigena, continuous with that of Greek as well as Latin writers, apparently was before their beginning, in which case the long tract of obscurity, that represents them to the popular imagination, had really no existence, and the attributes of the middle age must be stated with greater care and sympathy. To begin with, Erigena was a Greek scholar ; the last, I suppose, in the West before the time of Roger Bacon (twelfth century). He writes much in the sense of St. Augustine, but he also translated from the Greek the writings of the pseudo- Dionysius, and uses long quotations, rendered into Latin from Maximus (seventh century). Dionysius, thus Latinised, af- fected the opinions of Aquinas ; and so the ideas of Plotinus, with which Dionysius was saturated, form a continuous strand throughout the thought of the greatest mediaeval teachers. And again, Erigena was a philosopher ; true philosophy and true theology were for him coincident, not in the sense of subordinating either to the other, but in the sense that truth agrees with truth. His general views do not strictly concern us here ; but to show that a writer in the age of faith, whose use of fact and of analogy is absolutely childish, may yet be very rational in his leading thoughts upon central questions, it is worth while to mention that he maintained the Eucharist ^ Page 131 above. TRUE AMD FALSE BEAUTY. I4I to be merely a symbolical and commemorative rite ; treated the Mosaic account of the creation as purely allegorical, and as- cribed to hell no local existence, but regarded it as an inner state of the will.^ This is not the opportunity, and I have not the ability, to treat the vast problem involved in the mixture of reason and folly presented to us by the age of faith ; but I may be allowed to point out that in the division of labour, which the course of history enforces, it fell upon the middle age to make the first sketch-plan of a new life, and teach its use to illite- rate peoples ; and it is natural that attention could not be given to accuracy of details till after the main bearings had been roughly set down. Neither the philosophy of the great Greek classics nor the wide survey of methodic natural science would have met fairly and squarely the problems which pressed upon Augustine, Erigena, or Dante ; and therefore it seems as if all had happened in its due order, and as if the instruments which did accomplish the task were the only ones which could have done so. In aesthetic, Erigena does not seem to make any definite advance of detail upon Augustine, and even falls back in com- parison with him by a less vivid appreciation of the problem of ugliness. His strength, as is natural for a systematic philo- sopher, is rather in discriminating the relations which re- spectively constitute the true and false beauty of the visible world, as depending upon the position which the human mind may assign it with reference to the invisible world. He discusses this question in connection with the story of the Fall, following Maximus in his interpretation of the “ tree of knowledge of good and evil." This, the exposition says,* stands for the nature of visible things, which, if apprehended in their “reasons’’* or significance gives the knowledge of good, if taken as the object of desire gives the knowledge of evil that brings death. The “ woman ’’ stands for sense, the “ man ’’ for reason. God* made the visible creation in order that through it, as through the invisibly His praise might be multiplied, and He might be known , — not what He is, but that He is the single author of all creation both visible and in- 1 2 8 4 Prof. Adamson, art. “ Erigena,’* in Encyd. Brit. Erigena, Works, Floss* ed., p. 842. Rationes, cf. Plotinus* Xoyo&. Ih., 843 B. 142 HISTORY OF jESTHETIC. visible. And therefore [in the story of the FallJ God forbade human nature to take delight in the visible creation before it (human nature) arrived at the perfection of wisdom in which being made one with God (deificata), it might be able to con- verse with God about the significance of visible things. Nor would the woman, that is the fleshly perception, be able to attract the man, that is the intellect,* to take delight in the material creation externally considered (z.e. not in its significance), if he purposed to have the knowledge of the Creator before the knowledge of the created. Therefore it was the order laid down by the divine law, yfrj/ to learn of the Creator and His unspeakable beauty, and then to regard the creation in a significant or spiritual sense, conforming to the inclinations of the intelligence, and to interpret the whole of its beauty, whether it exist inwardly in significance or outwardly in sensible forms, as showing forth the praise of the Creator. " It* is not therefore the creation that is bad, nor the know- ledge of it, but the perverse impulse of the reasonable mind, which abandons the contemplation of its author and turns with lustful and illicit appetite to the love of sensible matter.” And following Gregory® of Nyssa, he identifies the ugly with matter that has no form or the wrong form ; that is, once more, that is not apprehended or desired in its true relation to the will of God. From the point of view of the universe, I imagine, there is according to Erigena’s conception no real ugliness. We find in him no special philosophy of fine art ; the dis- tinction between the theoretical and the non-theoretical senses is indeed touched upon,* but is rather minimised than accented ; and the general doctrine of beauty is exceedingly defective on the side of the distinction between beauty and knowledge. Nevertheless we have here a two-edged idea of great im- portance in the history of the aesthetic consciousness. In the first place, Erigena crowns the ascetic movement which had shown itself in iconoclastic opinion, by a sweeping con- demnation of the whole charm of the visible world, including both art and nature, except on a certain definite condition. Thus on the one side the antagonism of sense and spirit finds a thoroughgoing representative in him. But in the second place, the condition which he lays down, ^ Animum. * lb,, 844 D. * Ib,, 789-90. ♦ Jb„ 854. BEAUTV AS MEANING. as essential to real beauty, that the visible creation shall be apprehended as a revelation of the glory of God, and therefore apart from the relation of sensuous desire, appears to me to have more than a rhetorical value. It implies no doubt a disinterested sense of the real teleology in man and nature, and therefore approximates technically to Kant’s definition, “ teleology without an end.” And moreover it applies this sense of rationality to the whole world through and through, not merely to art nor to the choicer parts of nature ; thus mani- festing that conviction of universal significance which lies at the root both of modern science and of modern art. If we look back to Plato and Aristotle, we shall see that the mediae- val “ pulchritudo,” taken ais something co-extensive with the visible universe considered as the work of God which He has pronounced to be good, has become a far more familiar working conception and factor in opinion than was their icaXoi' in this particular application to the beauty of material things. And the transition from imitation to symbolism immensely facilitated this generalisation. Imitation is only a rule of art, and prima facie can make nothing beautiful which is not given as beautiful. Symbolism is a mode of interpretation ; and with all its enormous risks of arbitrariness, has the one advantage of absolute universality. If all that has a meaning may be beautiful, then there is nothing in which we may not chance to detect an element of beauty. It is easy to see how hopeful is such an idea, and how rich a prospect it opens, in comparison with the notion of the beautiful as finally and unalterably given to perception. Anttdpation of antagonism between “this” world and the “other" takes its sharpest form for Christians in anticipations of the second coming ; and it is said* that in the tenth century these assumed so definite a reference to the year looo a.d. (iooo years from the Incarna- tion) as to give a decided check to the erection of great build- ings. Such a revival of the belief in the short-lived ness of the whole visible frame of things forms i^n appropriate climax to the movement which began with a distrust of formative art, and ended with a condemnation, conditional in theory, but probably unconditional in practice, of material beauty as a whole. * Etuycl. Brit. arts. “ Architecture.” “ Millennium.” “ Illumination." 144 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC After the year looo, whether owing to relief from the ex- pectation of the end, or to the incipient organisation and national life of Europe, the practice of building was resumed with greater zeal than ever, and, as if a crisis had been passed, even the art of sculpture — though especially hateful to the ascetic spirit — began to make headway in conjunction with architecture. It does not seem, however, that either beauty in general or fine art in particular received theoretical consideration from the earlier scholastics. We find in Abelard’s hymns' the familiar sentiment that nature is above art, and he sums up the discussion, whether the heathen poets should be read by ‘ Christians, unfavourably to the poets,* relying in part on the example of Plato. His life, and the vernacular love-songs he wrote, must have had an influence greatly opposed to his teaching, which was probably determined by a revulsion of feeling almost analogous to that of St. Augustine on his con- version. viii. St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) must be uodernMind mentioned here, not only as the earliest Italian In Bt. Francis, virtue of the Cantico delle Creature, but on account of the peculiar qualities exhibited in his life and character. No more striking representation of the modern mind in contrast with the antique, no more felicitous union of the complementary and contrasted attributes which imply each other in the logic of evolution, could be invented by the his- * Abelard lived 1079-1142. For the hymns see Cousin’s edition of the Works, I. 300. Some verses from a hymn on the Creation are worth quoting. The beginning of rhyme is noteworthy, and so is the mixture of Horatian and Christian sentiment. Impensis, dives, nimns Domum casuram construis ; Falso sole pingis testudinem P'alsis stellis in cceli speciem. In veri cali camera Pauper jacit pulcherrima ; Vero sole, veris sideribus Istam illi depinxit Dominus. Opus magis eximium Est naturae quam hominum ; Quod nec labor nec sumptus praeparat Nec vetustas solvendo dissipat. * Works, 2. 442. CHARACTER OF ST. FRANCIS. 145 torian of philosophy to illustrate his argument. We said, in entering upon the post-classical time of decadence, that the modern mind in comparison with the ancient is a divided mind. It is not distinguished by inclusion within one side of an antithesis as against the other, bat by presenting both sides of the antithesis, whether reconciled or not, in a form which is at first sight that of the most trenchant antagonism. First, then, we observe in St Francis the very height of mystical asceticism, that is, technically speaking, the approach to God by irrational contemplation in withdrawal from the actual world. The story of the stigmata clearly points to habitual self-concentration of this kind. But, secondly, there is ascribed to him by common consent an extraordinary sympathy with nature, both animate and inanimate. The address to “ Brother Sun ” is strictly and logically Christian in spirit. The self-concentrated modern mind turns hungrily to nature, as aesthetic theory has pointed out in various formulae, just because it finds in itself so deep a need. And thirdly, in the mind of this mystical ascetic and sympa- thetic lover of nature there was an innate capacity for one great form of reasonable work — for organisation and the management of men. It is needless to enlarge on this char- acteristic in the founder of the Franciscan order. Even in so great a character as that of St. Francis these varied tendencies impress us with a sense of mystery and contradiction. They do not display themselves in the same action, and have an external appearance of being rather vicis- situdes of life than revelations of a single purpose. They are much less easily explicable than the attributes of the poet who is a citizen poet, or the hero who is a citizen hero, or the philosopher who is a citizen philosopher. And in the lesser moderns they do in fact to some degree fall apart, as they did in the sects and men of the decadence, — the Stoic, the Epi- curean, the Neo-Platonist, the amatory or pastoral poet. But yet they have an underlying connecti^, and in all their rich and apparently lawless profusion are essential attributes of the modern mind. Thus, for example, the self-concentration of St. Francis in his devotional raptures’ cannot have indi- cated a mind abstracted or detached from organic reason and ’ It will be remembered that Socrates is said to have been subject to trances of some kind. L 146 HISTORY OF MSTHETIC. reality, but only an element of abstraction and detachment which is the outward aspect of possession by profound and complex ideas. Especially this is the case, when, in the in- terv^s of action,’ ideas fall into shapes of feeling prescribed by tradition. The depth of the intelligence is correlative and not antagonistic to its breadth, and the reason which grapples most energetically and sympathetically with things outside, both needs, and for that very reason possesses, the profound- est self-concentration within. The meditations of the mere recluse are generally shallow meditations. TbeAstbvUo much less active and brilliant in his Ideas of Bt day, though less known to posterity by other than Thomaa Aqniiiaajj^^^^^ achievements, was the greatest of School- men, the Dominican Thomas of Aquino. Born in 1227, the year after the death of St. Francis, he lived on the public stage as an ardent controversialist in the interest of his order and of liberty of teaching, as a lecturer in Paris, Rome, and Bologna, and as the adviser of king and pope on questions of ecclesiastical management ; and closed his amazingly laborious career at the age of forty-seven, as St. Francis at the age of forty- four. I insist upon these biographical details because it appears to me that only by realising the energy of such brief and versatile lives are we enabled, as also in the history of Abelard, to place our finger on the quickening pulse of the time, k might be worth while even to raise the question whether the weakness of mediaeval science and philosophy wais not con- nected rather with excess of practice than with excess of theory. What we justly stigmatise as the subordination of philosophy to theology is, in other words, a subordination of science to a formulated conception of human welfare, with a strictly mundane if also with a transcendental side. The question is not unimportant, for it indicates that the essence of scholasticism is present, not wherever there is metaphysic, but wherever the spirit of truth is subordinated to any pre- conceived practical intent, whether mundane or extra-mun- dane. Some such considerations as these force themselves upon us, however much we allow for the dissociation of men’s practice from their opinions, when we contrast the busy public lives of Abelard in his greatness, or of Anselm, of St. Francis or St. Thomas, with the cloistered industry of Newton or Locke or Spinoza.* ^ I do not think that a comparison even with Descartes and Leibnitz, how- COLOUR AND SYMMETRY AGAIN. 147 The Summa Theologica, which was to bring to a focus, as we should say, the bearings of all knowledge upon man’s highest interests, was the antitype in science of St. Thomas' ideas of political and ecclesiastical unity. In this Summa the nature of beauty is more than once referred to.' The follow- ing points may be noted in accordance with the scheme previously adopted. , I. The substantive account of beauty is drawn ^ through the pseudo-Dionysius (translated, it will be remembered, by Scotus Erigena) from the tradition which was already a tradition in the time of Plotinus, and was criti- cised by him as inadequate. The precise correspondence of terms between St. Thomas, in a passage * where he cites chapter and verse from Dionysius for his view, and Augustine, Plotinus, and Xenophon * — the terms are “ Claritas et de- bita proportio” (brightness of colour and symmetry) *• rrvfxfjieTpla — leaves no reasonable doubt that this is so. In another place* “ Integritas sive perfectio” is added as a third element of beauty to “ Debita proportio sive consonantia" and “Claritas — i.e., color nitidus.” But this addition makes no difference of principle, only insisting from the side of the whole on the same condition which “debita proportio” im- poses upon all the parts. As in Plotinus, the ultimate ground of attraction in beauty is the affinity, revealed in symmetry, between the percipient and the perceived. Although St. Thomas makes the senses the direct bearers of this affinity — “ The senses are charmed with things duly proportioned, as analogous to themselves (‘ Sicut in sibi similibus ’ *) '' — yet he clearly adopts the derivation of all beauty from God,® and gives, like Plotinus, the first rank to the sense of sight ^ be- cause of its affinity to the intellect. ever prominent in the world these great men were, really invalidates this suggestion. Leibnitz was led by his practical interests to write a Systema Theologicum in the interest of Catholic-Protestant reunion. Even Francis Bacon has the scholastic attribute that his logic is moulded rather by a final cause in a human need than by real conditions ii| the nature of the subject matter. ^ See Preface. * Summa TheoL, 2 pars 2 partis, q. 145, art. a. * See pp. 45, 117 su/ra. * SummUj i pars, q. 39, art. 8. * /^., I pars, q, 5, ar^ 4. ® Lc. note 2 above. ^ Summa contra gentes^ bk. 3, ch. 53. 148 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. Thus we may conclude that symmetry is beautiful, for him as for his predecessors, because symbolic of reason and divinity ; but he does not, any more than they, follow Ploti- nus in the demand for life and expression as something more than symmetry. iEBfbetic 2. St Thomas lays it down that in beauty iater«Rt. desire is quiet, or is quieted. The meaning of this, which is per se ambiguous, for desire may be quieted by being satiated, seems to be made plain by the inference drawn from it, that the beautiful is the concern of the specially “cognitive” senses of sight and hearing and more generally, that beauty has to do with the cognitive power.* I think that this does not indicate a confusion between beauty and knowledge, but only a distinction between perception and appetite. ooncret* 3- The distinction between the aesthetic and CrittdBiit. unaesthetic senses — “ we do not speak of beautiful tastes or smells,” — is taken on the ground that sight and hear- ing are more the instruments of reason and more perceptive in their character than taste or smell. This seems to mean, first, that the semblance is in them more separable from the reality which arouses desire ; and, secondly, that they are capable of apprehending a structural whole. Thac there is no confusion between beauty and knowledge is shown by the clear contrast laid down between material and spiritual beauty, the latter being explained as something named by analogy from the characteristics of sensible beauty. The primacy assigned to sight as nearer to intellect rests no doubt on the same general grounds which have been analysed above.* In estimating it we must bear in mind that the great romantic art of music, as we know it, had not then arisen, while we all the more respect the prophetic in- sight of Plato and Aristotle, who in great measure understood the extraordinary power of sound. Thus it appears that the Neo- Platonic tradition was the principal element in the intellectual aesthetic of the middle age. Though a part of Plotinus’ concrete application was lost, yet the general scheme of his view was in conformity with the Christian consciousness, which, partly by inheritance and partly by origination, made an analogous conviction its * I pars 2 partis, q. 37, art. i. * I pars, q. 5, art. 4. * P. IX?" THE BEAUTY OF THE UNIVERSE. 149 own peculiar attribute. That beauty is the revelation of reason in sensuous shape, that its fascination consists in its affinity with mind, and that consequently the entire sensible universe, as a symbol of the Divine reason, must be beautiful to the eye that can see it in relation to- its Creator, all this had sunk deep into Christian sentiment, and is familiar to us both in profound and in shallow readings of the argument from design. Unquestionably, the middle age, throughout its long development, was inspired by this conviction, uncon- scious in its art which was an achievement, but conscious in its theory which was a postulate. Only there remained, and remains, a certain half-hearted ness in theoretical dealing with the phenomena of apparent unreason, for sesthetic as for theology. From the place of the grotesque and the ascetic, the mysterious and the sublime, in Gothic architecture and Byzantine painting, we should infer the boldest and most concrete practical monism, or acceptance of all that is as at least a part of beauty. But, on the other hand, from the total absence, so far as we have seen, of theoretical study directed to the concrete analysis of austere or recondite beauty in nature or in art, we should infer that for mediaeval theory the beauty of the universe was rather an abstraction, to be justified in detail by a later age, than an indication of genuine sympathy with the romantic con- sciousness. For all that, however, the conception of universal beauty was there in name at least, and by St. Augustine was felt to be capable of including real or apparent contradiction in some degree. Thus, by the side of a comprehensive and concrete artistic practice there had come down and been accepted a theory more comprehensive still, as including external nature, but bare of detailed application ; and when the aesthetic con- sciousness of the middle age had passed, not indeed from death to a second birth, but from birth and infancy to maturity and articulate utterance, the^ aesthetic theory was absorbed into artistic practice, which filled it at last with adequate content, destined one day to become in turn the material of more fruitful theory. Dante wais born in the lifetime of St. Thomas, and speaks with his voice, both in the formal theory of beauty, and in the meaning which he ascribes to the universe. Whether he 150 HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. would himself have said that his great poem was beautiful according to his own definition of beauty can hardly be judged ; but if not, it would none the less be true that he was actively inspired by that conception of universal beauty which for the mere thinker had probably been little more than a phrase or a dream. This wide conception, explicit in mediaeval faith, as implicit in mediaeval workmanship, was represented in the higher imaginative forms by Dante and his fellow artists, and in being realized was carried far beyond all previous intellectual ideas of beauty, and very probably beyond theoretical recognition on the part of those who realized it. CHAPTER VII. A COMPARISON OF DANTE AND SHAKESPEARE IN RESPECT OF SOME FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS. umitsoftiio The very strict limitations under which the pre- snbjeots. sgm chapter must be written may seem likely to annihilate its interest, but will really, I hope, preserve it from intolerable tediousness ; for any writer would be tedious, I imagine, who, not being qualified by a life-long study of fine art, and being guided only by ordinary cultivated opinion, should wander over the immense field of the Renaissance in search of an aesthetic moral. I propose, therefore, in the first place, to confine my con- sideration, except in mere passing remarks, to the two great poets who appear respectively to open and to close the age of the new birth, when we consider it not ais a fresh departure in letters and science, but as the flowering time of a beauty that had long been in the making. It will be possible to point out in these two typical cases some important features of the great movement in its course and issue. And in the second place it would, I should suppose, be un- endurable that any ordinary writer should throw out, so to speak, in passing, his general appreciations of these two suns of literature, upon whose splendours the greatest critics and philosophers of the modern world have expended their most industrious study. But under the strict limitations which I propose to adopt there is something definite to be said which is not wholly without value. I may illustrate my meaning by reference to the exploded idea that great artists are guided in production by aesthetic recipes or prescriptions. If it were so, what could be of greater historical interest than to disentangle from their works and to compare with one another the abstract schemes according to which these works were created ? And although no such formulae exist, yet undoubtedly there is in every work of art an element of distinct intention, subject moreover, like all our conscious purposes, to limits perfectly obvious to an onlooker though hidden from the author him- 161 152 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC self, with regard to the species of art to which it is to belong the sort of subject about which it is to treat, and the sort of point or significance which it is to possess. Such an element of formal purpose is especially inevitable in the case of modern artists who live in an atmosphere of reflection, and among them more particularly in the case of poets, whose imagination is forced to be conversant with explicit language and articulate ideas. It is to this element of formal intention, with its most obvious limits as regards subject and treatment, that I intend to re- strict myself in comparing Dante and Shakespeare. In itself, it is in each case a fact no less positive than that Turner painted landscapes, and Reynolds portraits, or that Goethe drew from Marlowe the connection of Helena with Faustus. It is therefore the legitimate prey of the historian, who is attempting to trace the 'extent and position of the spheres successively occupied by the beautiful in the intellectual sys- tem. For the sense and modesty of his interpretation he, of course, remains responsible. ^ First, then, there is a notable contrast in the Artuuc Form selection of artistic form by Dante and by bhake- hy the two Poets, j g^y « the selection of artistic form ” and not “in the artistic form selected.” For it might be replied, “ Shakespeare was a dramatist, and Dante was not ; what then ” ? But this is not quite the point. The remarkable point is that Dante, though a worshipper of Vergil, and apparently well acquainted with Latin poetry in general, and charged, moreover, in every fibre of his being with respect for in- tellectual authority, nevertheless devised a totally new .species of poetic art, coming under no possible category in the ac- cepted classification with which he was perfectly familiar.* He himself called his great work a Comedy first because it begins grimly and ends pleasantly ; and secondly, because it is written in the vernacular, in which even women converse, and therefore must be regarded as, in a humble style, con- trasted with that of tragedy.* But we need not say that it is not a comedy ; for it is not even a drama, having neither dramatic form nor dramatic unity. Nor can it seriously be taken as an epic,* for the in- 1 Letter to Can Grande. Dante’s Works, ed Fraticelli. 3. 508 ff. * As Mr. 0 . Browning seems to class it, Ettcycl. Brit., art. “ Dante.” Cf. for the whole of this question Schelling’s brilliant essay “ Ueber Dante in Philosophischer Beziehung,” Werkt, 5, 153. INDIVIDUAIJTV tN THE TWO POETS. *53 cidents are not in any normal sense parts within a single action ; there is in fact no action, and thus once more, the poem cannot be called a romance. To compare it to a didactic poem would plainly be futile ; and although it contains lyrical elements, yet nothing so heavily burdened with plastic and historical content could conceivably be called a lyrical poem. And yet it is anything but formless. From the scheme of the versification to the order of the argument, all is sym- metrically planned ; and so symmetrically that we should certainly call it pedantic were not its definiteness simply an attribute of perhaps the most vivid imagination that ever ex- pressed itself in poetry. The Divine Comedy, then, is absolutely unique in form. By setting the traditional classification at defiance it raised, at the outset of modern art, the fundamental aesthetic problem whether art-species are permanent. All this significance is lost if we go about in a half-hearted way to effect an approxi- mation between it aind an epic or a tragedy. And being unique, it is a very type of individuality. It is, says Frati- celli, “ a political, historical, and ethical picture of the thirteenth century.”^ Although it is such a picture, it yet has its central interest in the fate of souls, and more particularly in that of the poet’s soul. Nothing could be more universal, and nothing could be more individual, nothing even more personal. It is the climax of the long movement which we have attempted to trace, in which the individual spirit has deepened into a uni- verse within, because it has widened into oneness with the universe without. When we turn to Shakespeare, we find that in the form of art this unique and personal individuality is to some extent toned down. The comparatively slow development of English genius, together with the local remoteness which was in part its cause, had apparently enabled our great poet to take suggestions from the later or pseudo-classical Renaissance, without, however, being subdued by it into the formalism which elsewhere was rapidly setting i{» during his lifetime. He is aware of the classical tradition, and takes from it that which he needs The sixteenth century in England had been full of critical dispute and poetical experiments. The "dramatic unities ” of time and even of place were maintained by one ^ Fraticelli's edition, Introduction. *54 HISTORY OF iBSTHETIC. party with an absoluteness which we think unreasonable, and know to be un-Aristotelian But for this there may have been a comparative justification if, as Sidney alleges, the common romantic dramas of his day were even more careless of the contradictions which they forced upon the audience than the play of Ferrex and Porrex (1561), in which incidents that would occupy several hours begin and end while a single speech is being delivered on the stage.‘ Sidney however evidently thought that not merely reason, but tradition and the custom of the ancients, followed, as he tells us, by the modern Italians, were decisive arguments on behalf of stricter form.® The “ mungrell Tragy-comedie ” vexes him greatly; ^ See Sidney’s Apologie for Poeiricy circ. 1580. Shuckburgh’s ed. p. 51 ff. and notes. Perrex and Porrex -is the play known as GorboduCy in the style of Seneca. Sidney only refers to Aristotle as enjoining the restriction of time to one day, which is correct except for the absoluteness he lends to the “ pre- cept.” The unity of “ place ” he lays down, but does not ascribe to Aristotle. ^ The whole passage is so picturesque, and so exactly illustrates the scene on which Shakespeare was just about to appear, that I venture to quote it in extenso, Shuckburgh’s ed. pp. 51-54. “Our Tragedies, and Comedies (not without cause cried out against) observ- ing rules neyther of honest civilitie nor of skilfull Poetrie, excepting Gorbo- duck (againe, I say, of those that I have scene), which notwithstanding, as it is full of stately speeches and well-sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile, and as full of notable moralitie, which it doth most delight- fully teach, and so obtayne the very end of Poesie ; yet in troth it is very defections in the circumstances : which greeveth me, because it might not remaine as an exact model of all Tragedies. For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporall actions. For where the stage should alAvaies represent but one place, and the uttermost time pre- supposed in it should be, both by Arisiotlds precept and common reason, but one day : there is both many dayes, and many places, inartificially imagined. But if it be so in Gorboducky how much more in al the rest ? where you shal have Asia of the one side, and Ajfrick of the other, and so many other under- kingdoms; that the Player, w'hen he commeth in, must ever begin with telling where he is ; or els, the tale wil not be conceived. Now ye shall have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeve the stage to be a Garden. By and by, we heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, and then wee are to blame, if we accept it not for a Rock. Upon the backe of that, comes out a hidious Monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miser- able beholders are bounde to take it for a Cave. While in the mean-time, two Armies flye in, represented with foure swords and bucklers, and then what harde heart will not receive it for a pitched fielde ? “ Now, of time they are much more liberall. For ordinary it is that two young Princes fall in love : after many traverces, she is got with childe, de- livered of a faire boy ; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child, and all this in two hours’ space : which how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and Arte hath taught, and all auncient SHAKESPEARE’S FORM. 155 but we can hardly be sure whether his censure would have applied to Shakespeare’s humour in tragedies, for Shakespeare himself objected in terms not unlike Sidney’s, to the officious interference of the clowns in serious passages. Translations from Seneca and an adaptation of the Pkcenissce of Euripides were succeeded on the stage by the wild imaginations of Marlowe ; and to Ben Jonson and Shakespeare the whole conflict of forms and tendencies was full of instruction and suggestion.* Coming upon the arena thus prepared for him, Shakespeare adopts a distinctly traditional dramatic form. He accepts the examples justified : and at this day, the ordinary Players in Italic wil not erre in. Yet wil some bring in an example of Eunuchus in Terence^ that con- taineth matter of two dayes, yet far short of twenty yeeres. True it is, and so was it to be played in two daies, and so fitted to the time it set forth. And though Plautus bath in one place done amisse, let us hit with him, and not misse with him. “ But they wil say, how then shall we set forth a story, which containeth both many places and many times? And doe they not knowe, that a Tragedie is tied to the lawes of Poesie, and not of Historic ? not bound to follow the storie, but having liberty, either to faine a quite newe matter, or to frame the history to the most tragicall conveniencie. Againe, many things may be told which cannot be shewed, if they knowe the diilerence betwixt reporting and representing. As for example, I may speake (though I am heere) of Peru^ and in speech digresse from that to the description of Calicut : but in action, I cannot represent it without Pacolets horse : and so was the manner the Auncients tooke, by some Nuncius to recount thinges done in former time, or other place. “ But beside these grosse absurdities, how all theyr Playes be neither right Tragedies, nor right Comedies : mingling Kings and Clownes, not because the matter so carrieth it : but thrust in Clownes by head and shoulders, to play a part in maiesticall matters, with neither decencie nor discretion. So as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mungrell Tragy-comedie obtained. I know Apuleius did some-what so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in one moment ; and I knowe, the Auncients have one or two examples of Tragy-comedies, as Plautus hath Amphitrlo. But if we marke them well, we shall find that they never, or very daintily, match Horn-pypes and Funeralls. So falleth it out, that, having indeed no right Comedy, in that comicall part of our Tragedy we have nothing but scurrility, unwoorthy of any chast eares : or some extreame shew of doltishness, indeed fit to i?['t up a loude laughter and nothing els : where the whole tract of a Comedy shoulde be full of delight, as the Tragedy shoulde be still maintained in a well raised admiration.’* ® Cf. Ben Jonson, Prologue to Every Man out of his IJu?nour, 1599, where a reasonable inference is drawn from the fact that dramatic form has had a historical development, to the conclusion that all precepts concerning it are subject to modification in accordance with felt needs that may emerge. Cf. also Po!v/iiius in Hamlet^ “The best actors in the world,” etc. 156 HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC complicated organic structure of Latin comedy, with its five acts and separate scenes. He is more careful than his rude predecessors to motive or excuse his violation of the unities. He observes, except in the histories, with hardly any devia- tion, the sharp distinction between tragedy and comedy which Dante applied so strangely.^ That is to say, in the plays of which the catastrophe is not tragic, the happy ending or reconciliation is absolutely complete, and no irrevocable mis- fortune befalls any character in the play. Cloten in Cymoe- line, and Antigonus in the Winter's Tale, are the only excep- tions to this rule outside the historical dramas, which are the continuance of a pre-Shakespearian and romantic form of play. By the great place he gives to histories, therefore, he so far defies the traditional classification of dramatic form. More- over he refuses to employ the choruses, to observe the unities, or to push the distinction between tragedy and comedy so far as to dissociate the former from the humour that belongs to every complete representation of life. And in thus accepting a dramatic form he has accepted its freedom from personal reference. Perhaps in one well- known passage there is some playful malice against an old enemy. Otherwise, as is only too clear to us, there is no self-betrayal in Shakespeare. Even the story of the sonnets has practically to be accepted in its universal meaning. Its personal reference, whether ascertainable or not, is not woven into the texture of the poems. What a contrast with Dante ! Thus in Shakespeare’s poetic form the later or classical Renaissance is modifying the earlier creative or romantic Renaissance. And in this he differs from Dante, whose form is unique, individual, even personal. The Kind of Big. 3‘ regard to subject-matter and kind of niiicanee aimed significance a parallel contrast may be noted. atbyeaeh. Dante’s subject-matter is nominally the other world. However profoundly he may conceive the unity of the soul’s fate after death with its terrestrial action and character, this primary peculiarity colours his whole artistic scheme. Unity and symmetry of parts in the whole, which to him, as ^ “ A tragic beginning and a comic ending " seems to have been a stock medixval phrase for “ a good beginning and a happy ending.” See Dante to Can Grande, sect. lo. ALLEGORV IN DANTE. *57 to the earlier mediaeval writers, constituted beauty,* is no doubt the ultimate burden of his thought, but the vehicle of its expression is a dualism. In this it represents the mediaeval or early modern mind whose utterance it was. The same fate had befallen the kingdom of heaven that befel Plato’s ideas. The very principle of unity itself was hardened into something material, at all events into something sensuous, and was set in opposition over against that of which it was meant to be the unity, as “ another ” world against “ this.” Such a course of thought was inevitable. Reality, for early ages, must mean material reality, and the spiritual world could not become an object of popular belief except as a non-terrestrial abiding- place. This first dualism between our world of images and the other world of images, forms the content of Dante ; but beside and behind it there is also another, the dualism of the entire universe of sense-images over against its spiritual or moral meaning. This dualism within a dualism is never wholly absent from views to which heaven and hell are the necessary complement of earth. And thus the visions of Dante’s art were in the first place fantastic, being dislocated from their human context, and thrown into a shape in accordance with the imagination of a world beyond the grave ; and secondly they were consciously and intentionally allegorical or symbolical. He accepted the four concurrent senses acknowledged by mediaeval canons of interpretation,* as illustrated by himself in the following paragraph from his letter to Can Grande, (c.7.). “In order to a clear understanding of what I am about to say, you must know that the sense of this work ’[The Commedid\ is not simple; rather the work might be called ‘of many senses.’ For there is one sense which is got from the letter, and another which is got from the things signified by the letter ; and the former is called literal, the latter allegorical or mysti- cal. This mode of treatment, for the better understanding of it, may be considered in the case of these verses : ‘ When Israel came out of Egypt, and the housaof Jacob from among ^ Convito^ ii. 5 ; cf. Paradiso, i. 103 : “ Le cose tutte quante Hann* ordine tra loro ; e questo forma, Che r universo a Dio fa somigliante.” • Litera gesta docet : quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas ; quid speres anagogia .” — Fratictllu HISTORY OF jESTHETIC. ^58 a strange people, Judah was His sanctification [Vulgate] and Israel His dominion.^ For if we look at the letter alone, there Is signified to us the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses ; if at the allegory, our redemption by Christ ; if at the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of grace; if at the anagogic [elevating sense], the exodus of the holy soul from the bondage of corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystic senses are called by different names, yet generally they may all be called allegorical, seeing that they are different from the literal or historical. For ‘allegoria’ Is called so from the Greek aXXorof, which means in Latin ‘ alienum ’ or ‘ diversum.’ ” Are these two elements, then, the fantastic element resting upon the subordination of this world to the next, and the alle- gorical and abstract element resting on the subordination of all perceptible forms to a whole hierarchy of spiritual or ethical interpretations, — are these what is demanded by a theory which gives the weight we have persistently claimed to creative imagination and spiritual symbolism in the analysis of beauty ? Certainly they do not impress us in this way, when thus set out in abstract language, for, to mention no other objection, it would seem that thus taken anything could be made to mean anything, so that all reality and definiteness in the perception of beauty would be destroyed. If beauty indeed lies in sym- bolic meaning, and if symbolic meaning is utterly arbitrary, then we ask with Fra Lippo Lippi : “ Why for this What need of art at all ? A skull and bones, Two bits of wood nailed crosswise, or, what’s best, A bell to chime the hours with, does as well.” I hope that the distinction which solves this paradox will become clear of itself, through the very contrast which we are now engaged in considering. But with reference to Dante and mysticism in general, I must recall the principle which I have insisted on more than once before,* namely that the aesthetic value of mysticism, like the scientific value of alchemy, lies not in its precepts but in its practice. A man is not a great artist because he is prepared to see in everything, in a beautiful woman, in a classical poet, in a wood or a mountain, Quoted in Purgatorio^ ii, 46. * Ch. 2 and ch. ^ supra. SOUND IN DANTE. 159 or in the extraordinary attitudes or sufferings of human beings, types of theology and science, of ignorance, aspiration, and various kinds of sin ; this general tendency of mind Dante merely shared with the whole middle age from Plotinus down- ward. But yet, the faith in a meaning is a great assistance to looking for one ; and as a general rule the more a man looks for, the more he will see. Beauty, in short, thus ceases to be a datum, and becomes a problem ; and in pursuing a fanciful interpretation, the mind will often extract the expressive essence of sensuqus forms, with incomparable subtlety. Dante is not a great poet because in speaking of a she- wolf he signi- fies by it at once the temporal power of the Pope and the sin of avarice ; but because in his intentness upon the issue and the meaning, nothing that has a natural significance escapes his eye and ear. The place of sound in the Commedia, though suggested by Vergil,^ is so developed into importance as to be something new to art ; much of the horror of the Inferno con- sists in it, while the beauty of its introduction in the Paradiso gives that part of the poem almost a lyrical character.* Re- markable as is Dante’s love and perception of light,® in which he follows the mediaeval tradition, and probably the superstition inherited from Plotinus, yet the modern theorist cannot com- plain that he has inadequately recognised the power of sound. And the same is true of human speech and gesture. No Hellene, however skilled a spectator in the theatre of this life, has portrayed the beauty and terror of visible and audible things with so true and piercing a touch as this mystic hierophant of another world. In the art of Shakespeare, as distinguished from his private life and opinions, with which we are not here concerned, we find neither this kind of subject matter nor this kind of signi- ficance. In the first place, the balance of forces in the machine of humanity is for him not seriously affected by what lies beyond the grave. We could disregard “the life to come” ; what affects our action is that “ we still have.ijudgment here ” — an antithesis with Dante, which is really profound, but appears even profounder than it is if we fail to realise how for Dante ^ /En, 6. 426. “ Continue auditae voces,” etc. * Schelling, l.c. • See Church’s Essay on Dante for a collection of passages. i6o HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. too, heaven and hell lay ultimately in character. Yet when all this is allowed for, the difference remains immense. The first of the two dualisms which we found in the middle age, has in Shakespeare almost ceased to exist, and with it disappears the fantastic side of imagination, the dislocation of the visible world. Just here and there the presentation of real con- nexions is bordered or interwoven with a playful or mysterious supernatural, which does no more than furnish a decorative heightening to the true line of causal construction So far then, in sheer form of imagination, Shakespeare reverts to- wards the Greeks ; for their world also was one, and their divine was not supernatural. But the one world of Shake- speare included all that was not fantastic, all that was not mere machinery in the two worlds of the middle age ; and his naturalism therefore was on a different plane from that of the Greeks. It was in the very widest sense a romantic as con- trasted with a classical naturalism. And the second dualism, which we found in Dante, also ceased tq exist, as a dualism affecting the form of imagin- ation, in Shakespeare. Conscious allegory or symbolism, in which a thing and its meaning are two, like a riddle and its answer, was to Shakespeare a form of mediteval pedantry, just as the dramatic unities were a form of classical pedantry. Nothing does more to bring him near to us as a modern of the moderns than his easy superiority and cultured experience in face of the pseudo-classical and romantic oddities that had come down to his age. The allegory or arbitrary symbol is dis- cussed between Pistol and Fluellen ; the “elegancy and facility and golden cadence of poetry,” insisted on by Holofernes ; ^ the figure in rhetoric is given over to Touchstone, and the syllogism and law of identity to the clown in Twelfth Night. Indeed, without pressing dramatic expression into doctrine, it is fair to take note of Hamlet’s sentences, “ for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold as t’were the mirror up to nature ; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age, and body of the time, his form and pressure.” Whether by chance or by some freak of tradition, ‘ It is Holofernes who says " Imitari is nothing, so doth the ape his keeper ” ; and seems to prefer “ the flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention.” Is this a chance satire on some rebellion against the Greek theory of art? FROM TWO WORLDS TO ONE. l6l these words accept for the drama (I do not think that “play- ing” need here be sharply distinguished from the play) the very comparison by which Plato believes himself to represent the utter worthlessness of poetry, of the unreal making of things. It may be worth while to re-quote his words, which are cited in chap. II. of this work. “There are many ways in which this feat (of , ‘making’ everything) might be accom- plished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round — you would soon make the sun and the heaven and the earth, and yourself, and the animals, and plants, and all the other creations of art as well as of nature, in the mirror.” Thus once more, in comparison with Dante, we are back among the Greeks. Something indeed in the phrase which Shakespeare throws out even thus by the way, “ the body of the time,” “his form and pressure,” indicates the representation of life as a whole, of a tendency, and a spirit, and so far modi- fies the simile of the mirror. But the artificial symbol, the reality, not merely wrenched apart into separate worlds, but cut and thinned down to fit its abstract meaning, has dis- appeared along with the hierarchy of separate interpretations ; and, if we are to consider only the great world-epochs of the aesthetic consciousness, is gone for ever. But though the machinery of spiritual interpretation is thrown aside, the essence of it survives as a permanent gain. The value of human souls and the significance of their destiny' are no longer operative as abstract principles to be clothed in allegorical fantasy, but as an added force and tenderness in the penetrative imagination. It is worth while even to point out that as nature repeats herself with a differ- ence in the phases of evolution, a relation justly perceived in one part, will as a rule bear a genuine analogy to many relations on other planes of experience ; and therefore even * “ Is it true that we are now, and shall be hereafter But what or where depends on life.^ minute ? Hails heavenly cheer, or infernal laughter Our first step out of the gulf, or in it? Shall man, such step within his endeavour, Man’s face, have no more play and action Than joy that is crystallised for ever. Or grief, an eternal petrifaction ? " Browning, Old Pictures in Florence, i 62 HISTORY OK iKSTHETlC. the hierarchy of allegorical meanings, if its fantastic or arbitrary element were withdrawn, might turn out something more real than was known by those who formulated it At any rate, the “reasons,” laws or powers which work in man and in nature are now represented in their operation as character and ex- pression, not outside it as Deity, or theological principle, or reward and punishment. Thus the definition of Plotinus, identifying beauty with the expression of the rational, was for the first time fulfilled without abstraction or divorce of the elements involved in it, and the mediaeval aspiration to see the universe ais beautiful in spite of all its contradictions, was accomplished with even a more perfect unity than that re- vealed by Dante. '*ome*iater*"^ 4. In Concluding the comparison which forms Renaissanoe. the Subject of this chapter, we must recall the two conceptions of the Renaissance which we spoke of as linking it respectively with what came after and with what went before. We are accustomed in accordance with the former habit of thought to regard Shakespeare mainly as the creator of our present poetic world, and the inaugurator of our national greatness in the field of literature. Now in one sense this is all very true. He forms the most brilliant starting point of our literary art, just as Newton does of our science and Locke of our philosophy. But if we think that our art and its conditions are continuous with his art and its conditions, and that the perception of beauty as a living and active force was awakened in his time and has had a continuous development from then till now, in that case I imagine we are deceived. Within the history of the concrete feeling for beauty, to which poetry, and especially the drama be- longs on one side, though it also borders closely upon the province of intellect, Shakespeare in every way marks not the opening but the close of a period. Since him there has been no national drama. To-day in England the drama, in the sense of stage-plays which are poetic literature, does not exist. And I imagine that what of this kind exists elsewhere, and has existed since the middle of the seventeenth century, is only enough to show clearly that some conditions, whatever they may be, have during all that time been hostile to dramatic art. By the year 1600 the genuine productive impulse of the earlier Renaissance — the only productive impulse which the END OF THE AGE OF ART. 163 Renaissance contained — had already exhausted itself every- where but in England, where it was later felt Our two most competent critics agree in substance though probably not in feeling about the import of that painting by Raphael in the Vatican, which seems to set heathen poetry under Apollo on an equality with Christian doctrine under Christ. * And this room in the Vatican had been painted about 1508. Since then, although new movements of an isolated kind were preparing, the rich and simple beauty which was rooted in the middle age had become a thing of the past. Mannerism and the classical Renaissance on one side, science and philosophy (Descartes was born in 1596), the reformation, the English revolution, industrial changes, and the spread of printed liter- ature on the other, were rapidly making an end of the great artistic and architectural age of the modern world. Nothing is more striking than the present revulsion of feeling on the part of the most competent judges, against the architecture of St. Peter’s at Rome.* To condemn a revolution of this kind is like condemning the course of nature. After the flower, the fruit ; no plant flowers for ever and all the year round. Shakespeare had, as we saw, the good fortune to come at the very close of the great creative time, bringing his pregnant and plastic genius to meet the growing influence of free thought and classic tradition, so that by wonderful good fortune he was able to deal with the whole mass of romantic material in a spirit of natural freedom that was almost classical. It was perhaps as well that he was not conversant with the Athenian dramatists. A single simile of Euripides? it is said, is all that can be proved to have filtered through, by translation and retranslation, from the great Greek tragedians to Shakespeare. It comes through “ the Jocasta of George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh” (1566), a motley and incongruous piece built on the model of * Ruskin, on Painting and Architec^re, p. 213, says this was the Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, of the arts of Christianity. Mr. Pater, Renaissance, p. 186, says, “it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, that Raffaelle commemorates.” Irenaeus (end of second century, a.d.) says that Gnostics set up images of Christ along with those of Plato and Aristotle. The same point was passed twice, first with faces set to leave paganism, and next with faces set to return to it. * See Mr. Wm. Morris, quoted above, p. 135. 164 HISTORy OF ESTHETIC. the PhoenissiB^ really translated from the Italian without any trace of an appeal to the original, and it suggested the splendid passage in Hotspur’s speech: “By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap ” It is impossible to suppose that even Shakespeare’s genius, lightly as it dealt with Plutarch and Ovid, and with Plautus and Seneca, would have stood up quite unshrinkingly before iEschylus and Sophocles. It appears to us that in his case the true equilibrium of form and matter was attained, and that any further reinforcement of the influence of antiquity might have impaired that singleness of vision which makes him not only the last artist of the age of mediaeval romance, but the first of that age which we rather hope for than have arrived at, the age of romantic classicism or modern classical naturalism. For the pseudo-classical tradition, which, seconded by the peculiar fulness and force of the time, was for the moment a purifying factor in art, had many transformations to undergo before it again became anything but a noxious influence in the concrete aesthetic consciousness. Ultimately, indeed, through centuries of theory and criticism, it led back to a knowledge of genuine Hellenic life and art and ideas. And the best perhaps that this knowledge in the hands of Lessing, Winck- elmann, and Goethe did for art was to set it free from the fetters which a shallower knowledge had imposed. But in the purely intellectual region very great things sprang from this deeper and more genuine knowledge, and among these great things there arose, as the course of general speculation on its side demanded, a vital and profound aesthetic philo- sophy, which in its turn contributed a factor of very great value to the general speculation of the early nineteenth century. /Esthetic theory, then, as true philosophy develops, loses, and rightly loses, its practical relation ais a guide to art ; and the work of the best aesthetic theorists has been in a great measure to protest against that very misapplication of abstract precept to art which was a survival, in the wrong place, of the same critical tradition that had been the forerunner of true aesthetic theory. If, besides this negative function. ’ Mahaffy’s Hist, of Greek Literature, i. 366. The original in Euripides runs {Fhcenisstt, 504, Eteocles) — ucTTpuv av €\0oLfi aWipo^ Trpos avToXa? #cac ivcp^c, Svvaros 3pacrai rdScy fAfyCtrrrjv mar rvpavviSa. EFFECT OF CLASSICAL TRADITION. 165 aesthetic philosophy can ever have a positive value for artistic creation, it can only be in the very secondary sense in which first through technical philosophy, and then through popular culture, it may insist on the relation of beauty to life, and explain that, for example, to “ imitate ” the Hellenes in the true sense is not to copy their sculpture, but to be, mutatis mutandis, such men as they were. The greatest of all new departures since the time of Shakespeare — the art of music and that of landscape painting — have been wholly independent both of aesthetic theory and of Hellenic example ; and although the widening of our world by the recovery of antique master- pieces cannot but be helpful when their effect has, so to speak, passed into the blood of our aesthetic organism, yet I imagine that Greek literature has done little directly for our greater poets, and that study from the Elgin marbles has been an influence not without its danger for our painters. True aesthetic speculation, on the other hand, has been throughout in the profoundest sympathy with the new depar- tures and growing freedom of that sense of beauty, from which its material is drawn. So far indeed as in passing it may permit itself to judge rather than to understand, which latter is its only true function, it laments the difficulty and interruption which has been experienced by the European mind since Shakespeare’s time, in carrying forward the large and free expression of life in art which he inaugurated. Whether the future will show more continuity, and less that seems to be distraction and reaction belonging to a level which Shakespeare has transcended, it is not for us to predict. Our immediate task is go forward, thvough the awaking of free speculation and the deepening of current criticism, to the development of aesthetic theory as an integral element in modern philosophy. a (p. 163). Mr. Churton Collins has shown that there is a good deal more to be said about Shakespeare’s knowledge of the ancients. The question as between echoes and coincidences is most puzzling and interesting. CHAPTER VIII. THE PROBLEM OF MODERN ^ESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. TbeProceuof I. The beautiful is of interest to metaphysic Freparauon. tangible meeting point of reason and feeling, and to criticism as the expression of human life in its changing phases and conditions. The combination ot these two interests, after a protracted separate development, is the true genesis of modern aesthetic. Under the term criticism I understand for this purpose the whole detailed work of reflective thought in the exploration and appreciation of particular beautiful things, including therefore the services of classical scholarship in making accessible the great writers of Hellas, the labour of archaeologists both in disinterring and interpreting the treasures of Herculaneum and the other remains of the antique world, and finally the activity ot art criticism in the narrower sense, as the literary judgment passed upon works that claim to be beautiful, with reference to their beauty. In a general sense it might therefore be said that criticism from Sidney and Scaliger to Lessing and VVinckelmann fur- nished aesthetic philosophy with its data, while metaphysic from Descartes to Kant supplied it with postulates or a prob- lem. In each of these streams of thought further combina- tions of tributaries may be traced, and between them are all kinds of cross-connections. But the main distinction will, I believe, approve itself as just. Tii« Froionsed these preparatory processes, each of them interrapuon ot extending over a period to be measured by cen- turies, we may find the key to a difficulty which necessarily confronts the student at the point we have now reached. This difficulty, in its widest extent,* arises from the inter- ‘ The view referred to in the following pages is that of Schasler, Aesthetih, Buch II., Einleitung. I have attempted to indicate his conception, and my deviations from it, without the extreme lengthiness which a formal discussion of it would involve. IM LATENESS OF MODERN iESTHETIC. 167 mission of aesthetic philosophy, considered as a theoretical study of fine art, from the time of Plotinus to the eighteenth century of our era. But we may at once deduct from the period during which the absence of such theory is remarkable by far the larger part of the interval in question ; that is to say, the whole of the middle age down to the fourteenth century. The reason how- ever for which we may so deduct it is not that which an obsolete conception of the Renaissance is ready to assign. It is not that in the middle age there was no practical aesthetic consciousness, and therefore no object-matter to which a theoretical study of art could have been directed.^ There was no aesthetic consciousness, it is said, because art was purely the handmaid to theology, and was not yet alive to its true purpose of creating the beautiful. Such an explanation combines a historical blunder with a philosophical fallacy. The actual aesthetic consciousness of the middle age was as a historical fact the most continuous and creative that the world has ever seen. And although for long centuries it was inarticulate in the more intellectually imaginative regions, and accepted theology, perhaps, as the expression of its essential instincts, yet to set this fact down as precluding its claim to rank as an aesthetic consciousness at all is to commit the serious philosophical confusion of identifying the concrete ex- pressive impulse with the reflective aesthetic intention. So far from its being true that there is no genuine art-conscious- ness where there is no intentional aim at beauty for beauty’s sake, it is probable that such intentional aim is at least a grave danger to art, if not a sure symptom of decadence. It is not the caise, then, that the absence of detailed aesthetic research during the middle age was owing to the absence of any object-matter for such research. It was owing not to the lack of an art-consciousness, but to the very directness of the art-impulse, combined with the pressure of those other needs and oroblems which belong to the youth of a new civilization, and which invariably hindty the mind of such an cige from reflecting systematically upon its own productions. The elements of theoretical asceticism on the one hand, and of theoretical recognition of beauty in the universe on the other, which we traced throughout this period, only show that ^ Schasler, l.c. i68 HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. it was not the first but the second youth of the world — a second youth dealing according to its wants in naive and uncritical fashion with ideas handed down from a first matu- rity. A self-criticising theory could no more be expected of such an age, in spite of its not small intellectual equipment, than of Athens before the time of Socrates. But there still remains to be considered the period after the culmination of religious art in the fifteenth century, 'fAaexiprimd facie it would appear that the object-matter of sesthetic existed in abundance ; and with regard to this period the question has been urged, “ Why did not the full growth of modern aesthetic follow in two generations upon the art of Raphael, as that of ancient aesthetic did upon the art of Pheidias ? ” The answer given appears to me to be a false application of a simple truth. Ancient art, it is said, was practically com- plete when its religious inspiration had attained full expres- sion ; but the modern mind is reflective or divided, and modern art — the object-matter necessary as a condition pre- cedent of aesthetic theory — was not complete till the cycle of secular as well as of religious interest had been traversed by it in a continuous advance lasting till the eighteenth century. Now of course in the largest sense the cycle of modern art is not complete even to-day, and we hope that it never will be. But relatively speaking, the great art-age of the world did begin to draw to its close in Raphael, although by special causes it was prolonged in other countries so as just to cover our Shakespearian drama. Therefore the question is wrongly put, for the completion of the same single and continuous period to which religious art belonged, falls after Shakespeare and not after Raphael ; and the answer is erroneous, inasmuch as it assumes a natural progress even in pictorial art from the sixteenth century onwards ; whereas really there was then set- ting in the close of a period, only somewhat disguised by vari- ous forms and rates of disintegration in different European countries. The reflectiveness, range and versatility of the modern mind is rightly appreciated in the question and answer which we have examined ; but they fail to give weight to the distinction between such secularisation of art as that of Raphael’s successors, which marks the end of the great period, and is itself a decadence not because it is non-religious, but because it is no longer an expression of vigorous life; and LATENESS OF MODERN ^ESTHETIC. 169 such secularisation as that of the Elizabethan drama, which belongs by its colour, strength and profoundness to the middle age, though touched and liberated by more modern influences. After the Elizabethan drama in England, and earlier still in Italy, the impulse of the middle age was exhausted, and art had entered upon its chequered modern career, which did not attain any special completion in the eighteenth century such as would account by itself for the rise at that time of aesthetic speculation. The proof of this statement with regard to the close of a great continuous artistic age throughout the cultured countries of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could only be given by a complete survey of the history of all those minor forms of beautiful workmanship which are an absolutely infallible test of the extent and solidity with which practical aesthetic consciousness is engrained in the mind of any age. There has not been in any country of Europe since the beginning of the seventeenth century a generation really fertile in beautiful production, whether in architecture, sculpture, metal -work or wood-carving. It is on this ground, combined with the peculiar changes that passed over painting and poetry themselves at the time referred to, that we may safely afifirm the position of art in Europe since the sixteenth century, however occasionally brilliant, to have been quite different from that which it occupied before. Our question then is, not, why did aesthetic fail to arise directly after the time of Raphael, but rather, why did it fail to arise directly after the time of Shakespeare ? And the answer is, not that art retained continuous vitality till the eighteenth century, so that before that time the material of aesthetic was incomplete ; but that the peculiar nature of this material in modern times, consisting largely of a tradition alien to modern life, demanded a long process of critical apprecia- tion before its content could fairly reach the mind. It is quite true that the modern consciousness, in comparison with the ancient, is divided and not single. Theimere territorial exten- sion and national subdivision of the area of European culture in the seventeenth century is enough to bring this sharply before us when we compare it with the Athenian period, or even with that of Hellenism or Greco-Roman civilisation, though this had great territorial extension and some tinge of local colour. The architecture, painting, language and litera- 170 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. ture of France, Italy, and England alone, down to the seven- teenth century, form a material which could not be organised by reflection in one or two generations. And yet this was only, relatively speaking, one factor in the problem presented to theory. Each of the two great streams of intellectual activity, that of philosophy and that of criticism, had not only to absorb a present, that is, a recent past, of immense compli- cation, but had also to adjust itself to antitheses bequeathed by the remoter past called antiquity, both in its own content, and in its relation to the present. Till these two processes were completed, and their results were ready to combine, there could be no fertile aesthetic. 3. The philosophical preparation of the aesthetic problem, like the critical preparation of the to esthetic data, includes more than one tendency. As ultimately stated in Kant’s Critique of the Power of J udgment, that problem was the outcome of those two tendencies of modern thought, which determined his entire philosophy — itself a statement of this same problem in all the principal shapes which it was capable of assuming. i. As a first approximation to indicating the Tmde^eg, mature of these two tendencies, we may mention them under the technical names “universal” and “ individual ” respectively ; the Cartesian school with its descendant, the Leibnitz- Wolffian philosophy, being marked, on the whole, by insistence on the aspect of rational system and necessary connection in the universe (a tendency to which the peculiar monadic theory of Leibnitz forms no real exception) ; while the British empirical school, from Bacon to David Hume, started rather from individual feeling or sense- perception, and required that the theory of reality should be derivative from what this was supposed to announce. In the eighteenth century this latter mood was backed by all the forces of the time, especially by the passionate sentimentalism of Rousseau and the less philos<^g^ical scepticism of Voltaire. But the logical terms “ universal ” and “ individual ” do not give us much help in appreciating the real nature of the ten- dencies thus described. In all conceptions that have ever approved themselves to reason, whether in ancient or modern times, the factors thus designated necessarily find a place. We must therefore, if we wish to get nearer our subject than this general approximation, distinguish the particular shape in ••universal” and “individual.” 171 which the universal and the individual tendency reveal them- selves in modern philosophy before Kant, first from the shape which they took in classical antiquity, and secondly from the shape which each one of them takes within the current of thought in which the other is predominant. If we can make this clear, we shall have done all that is needed to explain Kant’s philosophical attitude towards aesthetic questions, and happily we are not called upon to undertake the gigantic task of narrating the whole development of pre- Kantian specu- lation. For philosophy proper, by which I mean the speculations of men who are known as thinkers on other grounds than their contributions to aesthetic criticism, reveals its extraordinarily abstract character during this period by an almost entire omission to deal with aesthetic questions, under this or any other name. What little demands remark in Shaftes- bury, Leibnitz and Baumgarten — Lord Kaimes, Lessing, and Burke being counted among the critics, and not among the philosophers — we shall find occasion to notice in ex- plaining the tendencies to which they severally belong. wstinguiBiied “• First then, we are to distinguish the “ uni- from Ancient versal ” and “ individual " tendencies of such Fhuosopii;. as Descartes and Locke respectively from the corresponding tendencies in any philosophers of antiquity ; let us say, of the Stoics on the one hand and of Epicureans on the other. We should begin by noting the difficulty of finding ade- quate contrasted examples of such tendencies in classical philosophy. In Plato and Aristotle, for instance, the two factors of thought are fairly in equilibrium, and we could hardly find, to set against either of these thinkers, a school of real importance in whom the balance was notably different. While if we compare the Eleatics with the Atomists or with Heraclitus, we feel that the antithesis with which we are deal- ing has no depth of application, such as the modern antagon- ism between free-will and t^essity, or between passion and reason. This difficulty of finding a*good example shows how little, comparatively speaking, the ancient mind was torn and dragged asunder by the conflicting claims of partial ele- ments in human nature each striving to pass for the whole. But further, if we look at such a contrast as that between Stoics and Epicureans, in which the mind of the old world is beginning to pursue divergent ideals after a more modem 172 HISTORY OF iESTIIETIC. fashion, we see that the antagonism is far less internecine than its modern representative. On the one hand, neither of these aspects of life is irreconcilably differentiated from the other which is its complement ; on the other hand, neither makes so jealous and exclusive a claim to be all that there is, and to annihilate its opposite out of the reasonable world. Stoicism is the outcome of one mood. Epicureanism of another. They are no doubt controversial in so far as they consist in rival theories, but each of them was to a great extent a way of life, and its adherents chose a path which suited their own tastes and did not bring them into conflict with the others. But, as we have amply seen, the characteristic of the Chris- tian mind is to lay claim to the universe as belonging to the individual soul. Nothing is indifferent to this mind ; God is everywhere, and wherever He is there is something for man to know, to do, or to enjoy. During the long centuries of the middle age this faith had been formulated in positive doctrine, and had embodied itself unconsciously in the widening range of sensuous perception and pleasurable production, so that when the flower of formative art had passed away, and the free intellect of Christendom began to re-construct its world in terms of self-conscious reason, both " universal ” and “ indi- vidual” points of view asserted themselves only as deeper complications within a frame of mind which to begin with was pre-eminently individual. The infinite value of a soul was a lesson too deeply bought to be readily forgotten. Thus the two tendencies of modern thought are distin- guished from their ancient correlatives by their common point of departure in the thinking, feeling and perceiving subject. Scepticism, which marked the close of ancient philosophy, chciracterised the beginning of modern speculation. Augustine, as we saw, very nearly anticipated the principle that my thought involves my existence, or rather, in Augustine’s words, that my doubt implies my thought ; * and on some such basis, the basis of existence as a separate but thinking being, the thinking, feeling and percipient subject in modern times de- liberately invades the system of things, with the conviction that it will certainly find therein what it demands ; either a reasonable framework according to causal laws, or general truths in harmony with observed phenomena, or a life that ‘ Page 134 above. REASON AND FEELING. *73 will respond to its moral or hedonistic requirements. All that it finds is expected or required to be in conformity with the organ or faculty of the subject, so that starting from itself as centre it can critically verify and reconstruct the world, from which it began by ideally isolating itself. There is nothing in antiquity at all comparable to the combined feeling of exter- nality and of assured dominion with which Bacon and Des- cartes look out upon phenomena. And from iii* T his being the general type of modern as eacbothor. contrasted with ancient speculation, for which the history of the post-classical decadence and of the middle age has I hope prepared the reader, we have further to ask how, within this individual or modern mood, the ineradicable im- pulses known as “ universal ’’ and “ individual " again assert themselves in philosophy. The history of philosophy appears to answer the question in the most straightforward way. In Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Wolff, Baumgarten we find a continuous march of thought which is abstractly rational and intellectual ; in Bacon, Locke, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, we recognise an empirical or sensationalist ten- dency no less abstract. The two streams meet in Kant, and it is their convergence in his system that sets the problem to later modern speculation as a w'hole, and more especially and distinctively, owing to the peculiar conditions of this problem, to modern aesthetic speculation. “ How can the sensuous and the ideal world be reconciled ?” is the general problem; “how can a pleasurable feeling partake of the character of reason ?" is the same problem in its special aesthetic form. But we have further to note, as a characteristic of the modern temper, that inasmuch as each of the philosophical tendencies is theoretical and controversial, claiming absolute and exclusive universality, the logical force of facts compels each of them to be represented within the line of progression mainly dominated by the other ; and it is therefore only by comparison, and in virtue of their respective bases and as- sumed points of departure, that the one-thief course of thought is distinguished from the other. Bacon, who championed the cause of “particulars” as if they were an oppressed population, held himself to be the very prophet of exact science — the abstract universal ; — and Hume, whose point of departure is the isolated sensuous impression, not only admits the universal under the name of a fiction, but in his entire scope and method 174 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. of reasoning is guided by a spirit of abstract analysis which makes him, though the extremest of sensationalists in metaphysic, a utilitarian rationalist wherever he touches on aesthetic.^ In the Cartesian school, on the other hand, the starting point is the abstract universal or the systematic intelligence, in terms of which feeling and sensation are taken into account only as obscure or confused ideas. Although in Leibnitz there is a concession to individualism, as against the monotonous ab- straction of Spinoza, yet the system retains its purely intel- lectual form, and the estimation of sensation and feeling as inferior species of intellectual idea was adopted by Wolff, and in Baumgarten’s hands determined the point of view under which aesthetic was for the first time enrolled among the accepted branches of modern philosophy. with doctrinal dualism of early UediMTsi Dual- Christianity and of the middle age was only a materialised expression for a conviction which never exactly coincided with it. It would be ridiculous to say that such men as Dante, or Francis of Assisi believed the world of spiritual realities to lie far away beyond the grave. But it is true that they were unable to satisfy the whole strenuousness of their own and still more, probably, of the popular convic- tion, without insisting on the antagonism between flesh and spirit under the image of a temporal and spatial separation. And again the image had a double tendency. It addressed itself then, as always, not merely to the aspiration after a region of divine reasonableness, but to that after a complete satisfaction to individual romantic sentiment. When therefore free thought set about the task of re-con- quering the universe for feeling and intellect, this material separation, which had never represented the actual dividing line between reason and sense, nor determined which of these factors belong to “this” world and which to the “other,” bequeathed to philosophy rather the habit or form of such an absolute antithesis as that between a “here” and a “beyond,” than any particular distribution of content between the two sides of such an antithesis. It is true that the ideas of Freedom, God and Immortality continued to stand over ^ Treatise of Human Nature, vol. ii. (Green and Grose), p. 151. See below, p. 179. REASON AND FEELING. 175 against such notions as those of necessity, nature, and the dependence of mind on body. But it would not be possible to identify the intellectualist school of thought as the heir of the former or supernatural point of view, and the sensation- alist or “empirical” as the heir of the latter or merely natural point of view ; for in fact the antagonism of freedom and necessity, purpose and mechanism, mind and body, is repre- sented with startling distinctness within the philosophic move- ment from Descartes, through Spinoza and Leibnitz, to WolflF and his successors; while the English and later French thinkers, who start from the “here” and “now" of sensation and desire, begin by transmuting it into a system of scientific and therefore ideal necessity, against which individual feeling, having learned its own importance from being treated as a primary datum and standard, asserts itself for example in Rousseau with a claim for freedom and satisfaction both here and hereafter. Thus either reason or feeling may seize upon the place of the supernatural, and either of them, again, may be interpreted into a purely natural system. Either of these, so long as they remain purely abstract opposites, may be regarded as freedom when identified with the willing self, and must turn out to be mere necessity when found to exclude an element that the self seems in concrete experience to contain. It is not easy to decide whether one would rather be a being without affections, as Spinoza, it appears, would represent man at his best, or the defenceless prey of successive solicitations of appetite accord- ing to the strictest interpretation of Hume. What is really gained by the pre- Kantian treatment of these antagonisms is a gradually growing demonstration, owing to the manner in which they dissolve into one another, that their cause must be somewhere in the nature of mind. V. The observations upon beauty thrown out pre-Kanuan by philosophers whether in hngland, r ranee, or PhuoBopiiy. Germany, before Kant, do not possess the note of progressive modern esthetic, and are not the true progenitors of that study. For, as we have partly seeR, and shall further see when we come to deal with Kant, it draws its peculiar import from the fact that it constitutes an essential and almost primary element in the treatment by which Kant attempted to reconcile the conflicting philosophical movements that con- verged upon him ; and it would be false history to represent as springing from certain external symptoms of these move- 176 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. ments the problem which really sprang from the whole system of forces to which they belonged. Kant no doubt borrowed from his predecessors in philosophy both the name of aesthetic and certain features of its treatment ; but the need of it lay deeper in his thought than any suggestions of theirs, and the material which was destined after Kant’s time to meet this need more fully was being stored up elsewhere than in abstract metaphysic. We must therefore regard pre-Kantian aesthetic, so far as it exists at all in the great philosophers, not as the generating cause of its later development, but only as an external attri- bute of the movement which was really such a cause. It is not necessary to treat it in great detail. The pioneers of free thought do not give much attention to the phenomena of the beautiful. Descartes and Spinoza, Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, throw themselves at once into what seem the most urgent and central issues of man’s position in the world — into questions relating to human free- dom, the nature of God, the extension of knowledge, the nature of the mind and of society. And in some degree the severe rationalism of these philosophers, whether its root be intellectualist or sensationalist, implies an attitude towards fine art that reminds us not a little of Plato. But yet in substance their ideas are far more favourable to its importance than are those of antiquity, for they stand on the firm found- ation slowly laid by the Christian consciousness in all the popular developments of the argument from design ; which is equivalent to saying, that even if they doubt the teleology of the world, they do not doubt its being rational and access- ible to intelligence through and through. Now on the basis of this conviction, upon which the modern mind is firmly established, the due consideration of beauty and knowledge is a mere question of time : it is only natural that reason should first consciously appreciate itself in its more plainly and directly intellectual expression. It is noticeable from this point of view that Descartes (1596-1650) wrote a “Compendium Musicae” — music, it must be remembered, formed part of the educational “ quadri- vium ” of the midtile age along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, under the name of a science — and though Spinoza (1632-1677) seems to have recognised no meaning at all in SHAFTESBURY. 177 the term beauty,^ which for him could only designate a con- fused form of intelligence, yet we find in — ^ (a) Leibnitz ( 1 646-1 7 1 6), an expression echoing mediaeval associations, while containing the germ of many later researches into the power of sound ; * “ Musica est arithmetica nescientis se numerare animi,” * “ music is counting performed by the mind without knowing that it is counting,” or, translating negative into positive terms in con- formity with Leibnitz’s system, “ music is a felt relation of number.” This, however in need of further explanation, is a plain case of “ reason in the form of feeling,” and so more generally Leibnitz falls back on the sesthetic point of view of Augustine by comparing the permission of evil in the universe to the introduction of ugly colour or discordant sound by an artist, enhancing the beauty of his work as a whole. This, of course, involves the assumption that what is beautiful to feeling is ultimately an expression of harmony, though capable of including apparent contradiction. The above is enough to indicate in general the starting- point of modern philosophy, so far as it affects the place of beauty in the system of things ; it is separated from classical antiquity by that whole interval of a new faith which separates Augustine or Erigena from Plato, but it is also inspired with its own freely analytic and progressive impulse. If) Shaftesbury (1670-1713) stands, so far as aesthetic is concerned, on the same metaphysical ground of the Christian intelligence, believing beauty to be an expression of the divine life of the world, which he contrasts with dead matter in a way too much akin to Plotinus, and is therefore unable to find an explanation for ugliness or evil. He sees, however, that the true purpose of art is to bring before the mind ideas and sentiments in shapes drawn from sense-perception, the trained eye and ear being ultimate judges of what is beautiful or not. His extension of the terms “beauty” and “sense" to the goodness of morality and the faculty by which we judge of it, is fatal of course to a distinct demarcation of the sesthetic region. But yet, by insisting on the education of ^ Erdmann, E. Tr., ii. 85. ® We shall notice later the effect on sesthetic of the rise of musical art. Between Descartes’ birth and Leibnitz’s death, Opera sprang up in Paris. Italy, Germany and England. * &e Lotze, G. d. A., 375. « HISTORV OF ^esthetic. 178 the art-sense, and by his detailed attention to the phenomena of art, he marks a stage in the growing tendency to appre- ciate beautiful production as in its own right an important activity of human life, and an important element in history. His criticisms on the limits of time over which an action, represented in painting, may extend, anticipates some of the discussions in Lessing’s Laocoon. So far as we can judge, the content of reason which beauty embodies for sense did not signify for Shaftesbury anything more than the formal principle of antiquity — the principle of unity in multiplicity. The advance lies in the complete and confident identification of beauty with the aspect presented by art and nature to trained perception. It is easy to speak of Shaftesbury as a Platon ist ; but we must remember that in place of a fierce anti-sensuous dualism, only indicating at times the identification of fact and reason, and for the most part hostile to art, we have now an easy-going pantheistic monism, almost identifying God, reason, and ordinary material Nature, and taking the charm of visible things as an obvious outcome of the divine principle. It is the world that has moved on, and that has verified the highest of Plato’s suggestions ; Shaftesbury is far from being a great philosopher, and does little but reproduce, in terms of the individual’s sensibility, the current ideas of his age. Hume worth while, before leaving the British philosophers, to notice the observations upon beauty made in passing by David Hume {1711-1776) in the Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1738. I should hardly have thought it fair to lay stress upon them, being fragmentary, and contained in a youthful work, were it not that they are in fact of considerable value. “If* we consider all the hypotheses which have been formed either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the differ- ence betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and con- struction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. This is the distinguishing charac- ter of beauty, and forms all the difference betwixt it and deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness. ^ Treatise of Human Nature. Green and Grose. Vol. ii., p. 95. BEAUTY REFERRED TO SYMPATHY. *79 Pain and pleasure, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence." “ — Beauty, like wit, cannot be defined, but is discerned only by a taste or sensation.” The greater part of the plea- sure of beauty arises, however, from the idea of convenience or utility. Now the point which seems deserving of atten- tion, is the precise mode of connection between this idea of utility and the sensation of beauty. For Hume lays down with absolute clearness that beauty, as a rule, arises from a utility which does not at all concern the spectator whose sense of beauty is awakened, but only the owner or person imme- diately affected by the real properties of the object. It is therefore only by sympathy that the feeling of beauty can exist for the spectator. A curious example is as follows : * ^ — “ I know not but a plain, overgrown with furze and broom, may be, in itself, as beautiful as a hill covered with vines or olive-trees ; though it will never appear so to one who is acquainted with the value of each. But this is a beauty merely of imagination, and has no foundation in what appears to the senses." This example seems to indicate a concession to what might be called the vulgar doctrine of utility, because monetary value does not imply high structural organisation. But we must not fail to notice in it the pregnant distinction between beauty of imagination — what would now be called beauty of rela- tion — and beauty for the sense, or beauty of form. If we ask for the nature and grounds of the latter, I think we must sup- pose that Hume resolves it into a more obvious case of the relation of utility — a case in which utilfty is plainly expressed in the physical form of the object. And here again, the plea- sure or pain upon which beauty or deformity depend, as in the uneasiness produced by an ill-balanced figure in a paint- ing, gains its “ vivacity ” through sympathy alone.* I sup- pose that his reason for not distinguishing, in the case of a work of art, between the spectator and the person really affected, is simply that in this case thare can be no such per- son, and therefore our sympathy can only be with each other’s ideas, and not with any person’s actual advantage or injury. Whatever we may think of the mechanism of impressions and ideas as described by Hume, it is plain that his doctrine of ‘ lb,, p. 151. • Ib,, p. 15 a. i8o HISTORY OF iBSTHETIC. Utility in beauty does not involve a selfish interest on the part of the spectator, and that it practically implies a distinction in natural beauty as well as in art between aesthetic semblance and real effect; and further, that his idea of an aesthetic generalisation of pleasure and pain through sympathy is strik- ingly parallel to Aristotle’s idea of an artistic generalisation of fear through pity. We thus get an approximate anticipa- tion of ]|^ant’s “form of teleology without the idea of an end,” and also of his “ disinterested pleasure.” It is so easy to be unjust to any one who mentions the term utility in connection with beauty, as Socrates too did, that these observations seemed to me to be necessary. And moreover, we have in Hume more distinctly than in Shaftesbury, and far more plainly than in Hutcheson, the important conception of a taste or sensation which though a mere feeling is affected with pleasure and pain by structural forms and relations of a defi- nite character, analysable by reflection, though not analysed by the appreciating sensibility itself. Such an attempt to trace the content of beauty is not to be set down as the mere abstract identification of it with pleasure-producing quality. Natnreoftiie It is of course a twice-told tale that the Advance, individualistic thinkers of Britain from Bacon to Hume, in the sphere of metaphysic or general philosophy, drove a destructive analysis deeper and deeper into know- ledge until with Hume the last word of sensational empiricism was spoken. But it Is a total misconception to apply the principle of this progression to the province of positive aesthe- tic research, which did not at that time form a central issue in metaphysical philosophy. And thus when we are told ^ that British aesthetic passed from Platonism (in Shaftesbury) to Aristotelianism (in Lord Kaimes) and subsequently ran into materialistic empiricism of the shallowest kind in Burke and Hogarth — Reynolds being omitted — we feel that the great formulae of historical philosophy have in this case hardly been grasped with the thoroughness which is needed for their con- crete application. The age in question was an age of reflec- tion, of antagonistic abstractions, of the meeting of extremes ; all this is quite true. But if we are going to interpret history by such a conception, we must not pick out a thinker here and a critic there, and throw them into a succession according ‘ Schasler, i. 313. THE REAL COURSE OF REFLECTION. l8l to their intellectual characters, quite apart from their special forms of preoccupation with the problems of the age. We must realise that the reflective character of the time, like all such dominant tendencies, was no mere intellectual instinct of certain writers in philosophy and literature, but was dic- tated by the whole existing situation of facts and forces, which placed the individual subject in presence of a set of completed systems, antiquity, mediaeval art, theology, political amthority, by overcoming which and reasserting itself in spite of them it had to win a new positive freedom and positive content. Now if we compare one of these forms of conquest with another — even though the same thinker is engaged in both, as may well happen — we construct a transition and imagine a tendency which is altogether unreal. As the English passed, in aesthetic, from Platonism to Aristotelianism, so the French passed, we are told,’ from Aristotelianism (in Batteux) to Platonism (in Cousin), and thus the necessity by which one- sided abstractions work out their opposites is supposed to be exemplified. All this is utterly unhistorical. Sidney, Corneille, Shaftes- bury as an art critic. Lord Kaimes, Batteux, Lessing, were all interested not in the issues of metaphysic, but in the adjust- ment of modern aesthetic feeling, always comparatively speak- ing somewhat romantic, to the classical tradition, represented at first by conventional conceptions of Aristotle and of Greek beauty, and then, as criticism deepened, by something nearer the real Aristotle and real Greek art and poetry. Within this domain of criticism the work of reflection took the form, prescribed for it by circumstances, of struggling with the given antithesis which was the primary fact of the situation, and as reflection gradually broke through the rind of tradition, its results became more and more empirical in the sense of being more vital, more concrete, more akin to the true philo- sophical speculation which was to arise from its endeavours. It is a wild confusion to identify the appeal to aesthetic fact in Hogarth, Burke and Reynolds, und^ the ambiguous name empiricism, with the increasingly severe and abstract analysis of general experience which culminated in the metaphysic of David Hume. The one made content richer, as we have seen in the aesthetic suggestions of Hume himself ; the other ‘ Schasler, l.c. i 82 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. made it poorer for the moment, and only richer in a construc- tive sense, by helping to prepare the place which a fuller con- tent would one day occupy. The two movements together were therefore, eis we have urged throughout, pioneering the junction which followed in and after Kant. I may add that in order to gain probability for the perverse view which has been indicated, Schasler omits Sidney at the beginning of the English development, and adds on Cousin, who belongs to a wholly different age, at the end of the French. The “ critical ” movement, in the sense de- fined at the beginning of the present chapter, is in England from Sidney to Burke and Hogarth, in France from Corneille to Rousseau and Diderot, in Germany from Gottsched and Ramler to Schiller and Goethe. If the true nature of this movement had been understood, the attempt would not have been made to display an antithetical progression by simply passing in the account of English thought from a metaphysical to a critical writer, and in that of French thought from a critical to a metaphysical one. The movement of eighteenth-century metaphysic in France needs no separate treatment. The operative forces that framed the problem for Kant are adequately represented within the region of philosophy, by the British school on the one hand, and the Wolffian, containing in it many elements of French (Cartesian) origin, on the other. Baumsarten British school, Starting from what is most individual in the individual, worked upwards to aesthetic ideas from observing the trained artistic sense, or from analysing the conditions of disinterested pleasure, the Cartesian school, continuous for our purposes with the Leib- nitzian, worked downward to aesthetic ideas by ultimately attempting to extend its intellectualist theory, which deailt primarily with knowledge, to the phenomena of feeling and perception. And the extension thus initiated by Baumgarten (1714-1762) under the name “ .dEsthetica,” was so far cha- racteristically concerned about the theory of beauty as to hand down the term .Esthetic as the accepted title for the philo- sophy of the beautiful. The genesis of his conception appears to have been as follows. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Wolff, form as intellectualist philosophers an unbroken sequence, in spite of Leibnitz’s revolt against the abstract unity of Spinoza’s “ sub- CLEAR AND CONFUSED. 183 Stance." Throughout this whole succession the passions and sense-perceptions are described in terms of the abstract in- telligence, and therefore negatively, that is to say, by the attribute in which they differ from an abstract idea Both sense-perception and passion are, according to Spinoza, “con- fused acts of thought,” ‘ and in Wolffs psychology there is a complete set of faculties belonging to the “ obscure ” portion of knowledge, and corresponding to the faculties of the dis- tinct intellect. Now clear thinking was treated by Wolff in the science or method of Logic, both theoretical and practical, as an introduction to theoretical philosophy or metaphysic with its four parts, Ontology, Cosmology, Ethics, and Psycho- logy. It occurs then to Baumgarten, who in every way continues to push the survey of science into detail — he wrote a Sketch of Philosophical Encyclopcedia a term inherited by German philosophy from late Greek and mediaeval educa- tion — to prefix to the Wolffian logic, or method of clear knowledge, a still prior science or method of sensible or obscure knowledge, to be called ^Esthetic. Such a prelimin- ary science might, it has been observed,* have taken the form of inductive logic, or it might be added, as in Kant, of an enquiry into the nature of the forms of sense. But Baum- garten is thoroughly consistent. Inductive logic and the theory of space and time both belong to the doctrine of clear knowledge — such a doctrine as that of modern logical text- books where they deal with “the extraction of general pro- positions from sense-perception.” But the subject of the yEsthetica is “ obscure conception ” qua obscure, that is knowledge in the form of feeling and remaining in that form. To us, no doubt, sense-perception is apt to seem the clearest of data, and we hardly see the force of a distinction which ranks it as “ confused.” I imagine that what is meant by clear and confused through this whole succession of philosophies may be illustrated by the possibility of adequately expressing this or that matter in words.® I suppose that a clear idea ^ one which is so cut down and defined as to be communicable by a conventional sign with a tolerable degree of adequacy, while a confused ‘ Erdmann, E. Tr., ii. 85. ® Zimmermann, i. 169. * See, Erdm.ann on Leibnitz and Descartes, ii. i8*. 184 HISTORY OF ifiSTHETIC. idea is one which remains of a kind and complexity — such as a harmony of colour — which language cannot reproduce. That the “ confused idea ” can have an order of its own, which is appreciable to feeling, seems to be presupposed in the idea of beauty, and insisted on by Baumgarten in his dis- cussion. The sphere of aesthetic, then, is a whole complex of faculties, those which represent any connection in a confused form,^ and which, taken together form the “analogon rationis,” the parallel or parody of reason in the province of confused knowledge. Thus it is clearly more akin to the subject of psychology than to that of logic or elementary metaphysic, and appears to me to be a conception to which modern psychology, constantly finding parallels to logical processes in unconscious or sub- conscious mental movements, is bringing us back. But again it was not quite from this point of view, not as a parallel in the form of feeling to logical processes, that the region of obscure ideas pressed itself on Baumgarten’s attention. Such a treatment would still make the excellence of sensuous per- ception consist in a form of truth — which can only exist in so far as the perception is after all interpreted into a judg- ment, a feeling that “ something is so or so.” Baumgarten maintained his distinction more thoroughly than this, and with a coherence for which he hardly receives due commen- dation. He gives to the perfection of sensuous knowledge, i.e., of feeling or sensation, the name of beauty, as the mani- festation in feeling — so I understand the accounts of him — of that attribute which when manifested in intellectual know- ledge is called truth. Only it is difficult to see how he could call JEsthetic thus construed the art of beautiful thinking (pulchre cogitandi),* for thinking always conveys to us the idea of an intellectual process. His analysis of the content of this perfection is not adequate to his conviction as to the source from which it is to be drawn. In the former he does not advance beyond the theories of antiquity ; in the latter he shares the consciousness of his age, though hidden under a phraseology that recalls the old attitude of Plato. In every way therefore he is on the threshold of a new movement. The idea of perfection had played a great part in the * Zimmermann, A., i. 165. * Erdmann, ii. 240. PERFECTION AND IMITATION. 1 85 Speculation of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, and was directly transmitted from Wolff to Baumgarten. It might be generally defined as the character of a whole in so far as this whole is affirmed by its parts without counter-action, and thus perfection became a postulate of everything real, because reality depended upon power to harmonise with the greatest number of conditions. In Wolff, therefore, it naturally comes to mean the mere logical relation of the whole to part, of unity in variety, and this is the sense in which Baumgarten also employs it. The content of beauty for him is therefore nothing more than our old friend the formal principle of unity in variety which may, of course, at any moment take the form of teleology. Whatever is opposed to the perfection of sensuous knowledge, that is to the unity of parts in the whole of the sense-perception, is ugly. But from the same tradition which gave him the abstract idea of perfection, he derives a peculiar conviction as to the source from which alone such perfection can enter the region of feel- ing. It must be observed that in speaking of perfection of sensation, when we might speak of sensitive appreciation of perfection, he is perfectly in his right. The character of the perceptive content as such and in itself is what concerns aesthetic, just as the character of knowledge as such and in itself is what concerns logic. The distinction of subject and object concerns metaphysics, but not logic nor aesthetic. The greatest degree of perfection was to be found, accord- ing to Leibnitz, in the existing universe, every other possible system being as a whole less perfect. Baumgarten, in- heriting this view, which is really a triinslation into philosophy of the Christian teleological consciousness, makes nature, the world accessible to sense-perception, the standard and pattern of art. This raises in a quaint form the whole problem of the fantastic imagination. The poetical world of fable and mythology possesses only “ heterocosmic ’’ ‘ truth, and there- fore has a less degree of perfection and of beauty than the actual world of experience. The introduction of the heathen deities in modern poetry appears to him therefore thoroughly erroneous. Imitation of nature is the law of art. The fundamental connection of his views, in spite of their verbal coincidence with the doctrine of antiquity, is altogether 1 “ Belonging to another world.*' 1 86 HISTORY OF ifiSTHETIC. modern. The nature which is to be imitated is for him the revelation of perfection, not as in Plato a secondary and inferior world ; and to reproduce it is a high but possible task, not an idle indulgence and a vain endeavour. The hiatus is between the formal principle of perfection, i.e. unity in variety, and the immense and individual splendour of the world, which ♦hat abstract principle is wholly inadequate to comprehend. A deeper analysis was needed to exhibit this concrete content as a development of that abstract principle. In many respects the attitude of later German philosophy towards aesthetic was anticipated, perhaps influenced, by Baum- garten. The feeling that art was a sort of preparatory discipline to speculative knowledge, and the doubt whether the two could thoroughly co-exist, seems to reproduce itself in Schiller and in Hegel, although they rejected the still more decided intel- lectualist prejudice which makes Baumgarten apologise for his subject as something below the dignity of philosophy, but after all interesting to the philosopher as a man among men.^ Again, the idea of beauty as felt perfection lends itself of course readily to Kant’s conception of teleology without the distinct notion of an end, although the other important Kantian distinction between the beautiful and the object of desire, does not appear to have been made by Baumgarten otherwise than through the general leaning to knowledge more than pleasure as the central characteristic of beauty. But all perfection gives pleasure and causes desire, and beauty is a kind of perfection. The desire for the real object suggested in art, and the interest in the beautiful as beauti- ful, are perhaps not distinguished by him, as they are not with absolute clearness by Kant. Apart from this one point of obscurity the definite demarcation of aesthetic from logic and ethics was in itself a considerable service to philosophy ; and the bias which its author showed against the “ unnatural " or “ fictitious ” started the enquiry into the ideal on the whole in a right direction ; * only a certain weakness which Baum- garten had for allegory, as fiction in the service of truth, perhaps affected Winckelmann or at least was shared by him. It seems needless to discuss the views of other philosophers between Baumgarten and Kant, such as Mendelssohn. What * Zimmermann, i., 159. Hegel, y£sth., Introd. E. Tr., p. 8. * See for the solution Modern Painters, iii. 131. STATEMENT OE THE PROBLEM. 187 is essential in the culture of the later eighteenth century belongs rather to the critical than to the speculative move- ment, and will be indicated in the next chapter. Kant took up the problem of general philosophy on its German side directly from Baumgarten, from whose' compendia he was at first in the habit of lecturing.* When Hume and Baumgarten had written the array of strictly philosophical forces was com- plete. The suggestions made on points of aesthetic by them and other writers, although no doubt they furnished Kant with the technical term ^Esthetic, and perhaps with some of his detailed ideas, were not the principal factors in the question that urged itself upon him. The question was, I repeat, in its general form, “ How can the sensuous and the ideal world be reconciled ? ” and in its special aesthetic form, “ How can a pleasurable feeling partake of the character of reason ? ” It was the former question which gave, for Kant, its full import to the latter ; and it was the concrete solution of the latter, following upon Kant’s statement which was in itself half an answer, that paved the way for a new and more fertile treatment of the former. ^ Erdmann, ii. 338. CHAPTER IX. THE DATA OF MODERN .ESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. In the beginning of the last chapter we distinguished the processes which paved the way for modern aesthetic speculation into the formulation of the problem by philosophy, and the preparation of the data by criticism. This latter process forms the subject of the present chapter. Criticism in the widest sense includes, as we saw, the work of classical scholarship or philology, of archaeology, and of art-criticism or the appreciation of beautiful things as beautiful. Each of these movements represents in its own form that antithesis which is inherent in the position of the modern world as coming after the ancient, and which distin- guishes its whole basis of thought and feeling, as historical and reflective, from the direct naturalism of antiquity. It is not necessary for our purpose to write a complete account of classiccil philology or of archaeology from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Such an account of either ais the late Mr. Mark Pattison might have written would be of the utmost value for the comprehension of modern philosophy, but would demand a knowledge such as few but he have possessed, and would considerably exceed in compass the whole of the present work. I . I will simply recall two great moments in the puioiogT- history of philology which have been indicated by the writer to whom I have just referred. joMph8oaUg«r. . *• year 1583 Joseph Scaliger* published his De Emendatione Temporunt, the first attempt to apply modern astronomical knowledge “ to get a scientific basis for historical chronology.” This attempt led up to the Thesaurus Temporum (1606), "in which* every chronological relic extant in Greek or Latin was reproduced, placed in order, restored, and made intelligible.” ‘ Mark Pattison’s Essays, I. i 6 a, * Ih., 162. 188 PHILOLOGY. 189 This great work involved nothing less than the conception of Universal History, breaking down the barrier, then con- sidered absolute, between the classical and the biblical world, and including in the problem of historical research the extra- classical world also. The importance Of this achievement for us is not so much in the active effect of its great idea — for, it appears, this idea remained unfertile through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — as in the proof which it affords that by the beginning of the seventeenth century the remains of antiquity were in the possession of the learned world in a degree which could suggest the conception of understanding the ancient civilisations as a whole. F A.woit about two hundred years later,' in 1786, F. A. Wolf “ prevailed on the Chancellor of the University (at Halle) to erect a philological seminarium for the special training of classical teachers." In the conduct of this seminarium* Wolf developed his conception of “philology,” as a student of which — “ Studiosus philologiae " — he had in- sisted upon being set down twenty years before in the matri- culation-book at Gottingen, where, as at other universities, no such faculty was then recognised. Philology, he conceived, was now capable of becoming a study in its own right ; the ancient* languages were no longer the mere introduction to law or theology, nor could they any longer be held as the storehouse of all knowledge. The purpose of philology was more and less than these. It was nothing short of the knowledge of human nature as exhibited in antiquity. That is to say, the inheritance of classical learn- ing, which had so long appeared as a foreign element, mys- terious alike in its value and in its worthlessness, within the romantic life of modern Europe, had now been mastered, and had become transparent, and was seen to deal with utterances of human nature belonging to a development of which we also, with our utterances and self-expressions, form a part. The Prolegomena to Homer, published in 1795, further and most profoundly stimulated thought in*this direction, by show- 1 Id. ib., 363. 2 A system of classes in which the intending teacher teaches under the eye of the inspector — in this case Wolf. For the origin and antiquity of this system see Hatch's Hibbert Lectures. He refers to it our term “ Frahctor,'* « Id. ib. 190 HISTORY OF iBSTHETIC. ing that “ Homer ' was no single poet, writing according to art and rule, but a name which stood for a golden age of the true spontaneous poetry of genius and nature.” The fixed ideas of the eighteenth century had been breaking up before this time, and breaking up in this direction. An interest had arisen in popular poetry. Ossian and Percy’s Reliques had stirred the sympathy of German poets and men of letters. The whole critical movement, in the narrower sense of art- criticism, which we shall consider below, had, from Gottsched to Goethe, a tendency of the same kind. More especially, British writings translated into German* had pointed out the “ naturalness ” of Homer, and the probability that he com- posed without the help of writing. Thus when Wolf inaugu- rated his profound conception of philologfy and made clear the difference between the natural and the artificial epic, the time was obviously ripe for an appreciation of the classical writings in their deepest relation to definite phases of life, and as objects of such appreciation the works of ancient art and poetry became materials for aesthetic philosophy. It is re- markable that the dates of Wolf s great achievements fall with- in or close upon the fateful decade (1790-1800) in which by an unparalleled concentration of influences the future form of modern aesthetic, and with it of modern objective idealism, Weis in its essence determined. 2. The higher spirit of archaeology is the same Arcbteoiogy. philology as Wolf defined it, and indeed he included in the latter science the study and inter- pretation of ancient works of formative art. While, on the other hand, that part of the work of such a student as Winckel- mann, which bears most directly upon our subject, is of a semi-philosophical nature, and must be treated under the head of art-criticism rather than under that of archaeology. In the present section my purpose is only to point out one or two tangible facts which appear to me to be significant, con- cerning the dates at which important relics of antiquity became known to modern inquirers. I have not met with any con- spectus of information on this head such as a historian of ancient formative art could put together in a few lines, which would be, as I imagine, of the utmost interest and value for the history of culture. My own knowledge on the subject is • D. B. Monro, art. " Homer,” Efuycl. Brit. • See id. ib. THE LATIN RENAISSANCE. 191 far too meagre; but I give some facts as better than none at all. Early siBooverieB it is a curious external illustration of the on Italian soa nature which we have ascribed to that classical tradition which the Renaissance handed down, that its earlier days were occupied with the later works of art. The Apollo Belvedere, probably a Roman copy of a fine statue of the third century b.c., was discovered about the end of the fifteenth century at Antium. The Laocoon, probably an original of the Rhodian school of about the second century B.C., was found at Rome in 1506, and was known to Michael Angelo, who attempted to restore the father’s right arm. The Belvedere torso of Heracles, by Apollonius in the first century b.c., was found at Rome about the same time, and was enthusiastically admired both by Michael Angelo and by Winckelmann. The group of Dirce, an original of the same school as the Laocoon, was found in the Baths of Caracalla in 1525. ’ The figures of the Florentine Niobe group, a Roman copy of a very fine original of the second period of Greek sculpture (of which better partial copies exist than the Florentine), were found at Rome in 1583. I do not know that before the middle of the seventeenth century any modern had seen a work of Greek sculpture executed between 500 and 400 B.c. Winckelmann,* one hundred years later, mentions that Montfaucon believed no works of Greek sculp- ture to be in existence more ancient than the Roman period. This order of discovery is not accidental. It arises from the Latin character of the Renaissance, and from the conse- quent fact that its direct contact with antiquity was on Italian soil, where the greatest works of Hellas, even if some had been transported there by purchasers or plunderers, were infinitely out-numbered by productions of a later age, and by copies freely multiplied,* l^th from earlier and from later originals. The diversion of interest towards Greek soil was subsequent to this time, and parallel with the deeper inter- pretation of the classical tradition. • Just as we saw to be the case with classical form in litera- ^ Gesch, d, Kunst des Altei thiims^ viii. i. 26. * If we compare a Greco-Roman Caryatid with the British Museum Caryatid from the temple of Athene Polias, we shall see the immensity of the gulf between different renderings of the same type. 193 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. ture, so too the ancient sculptures were regarded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries chiefiy as models for artists.^ After the sixteenth century a beginning of disinterested study was made under the influence of the conception that ancient poetry and ancient formative art were especially fitted to illustrate one another ; a conception which Lessing is really disputing in that part of the “ Laocoon ” which refers to the works of Spence and Caylus.* BarijTniTeia h- It was in the latter half of the seventeenth la anaee. century, shortly before the fatal bombardment of the Acropolis by Morosini in 1687,* that Sponand Wheler pub- lished the narratives of their tour in Greece, and that Carrey, a French artist, commissioned by the French ambassador to the Porte, made those sketches of the Parthenon sculptures which are the earliest indications of their state. Morosini himself had, it seems, some of the collector’s enthusiasm, or at least knew the value of the marbles ; and his desire of pos- session was no less ruinous than his warlike operations ; for not only did a shell dropping into the Turkish powder store within the Parthenon blow down the middle part of the build- ing, but after the Venetians had occupied the city the work- men employed by Morosini to remove the horses of Athene from the western pediment let them fall on the rocks of the Acropolis, where they were dashed to pieces. Many frag- ments of statues were carried off by officers of Morosini’s force, some of which have since been recovered.* Carrey’s drawings do not seem to have been known to Winckelmann, and in fact they would be of little use before the sculptures themselves were accessible. Hwcuianetun hi* A remarkable stimulus to archaeological and Pompeu. research wais given by the accidental discovery of antiquities at Herculaneum in 1709, leading to the com- mencement of excavations in 1 738, and by similar discoveries leading to researches at Pompeii from 1755 onwards. Winck- elmann arrived at Rome in this year, and from time to time * Encycl. Brit., art. “ Archaeology.” * The titles of their works are suggestive : Spence’s Poly metis, or. An Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Ancient Artists, 1755, and Caylus’ Tableaux tiris de riliade. * Murray’s Hist, of Greek Sculpture, ii. ai. ^ Overbeck, i. 391. THE ELGIN MARBLES. *93 wrote reports of the Herculanean discoveries, on which part of his discussion upon the painting of the ancients is based.^ It does not indeed appear that any works of the best time were added to the data of aesthetic by the discovery of Her- culaneum and Pompeii ; what was gained, in addition to very considerable archaeological knowledge, and a large mass of characteristic though late Greek art, was rather the sense of vitality and completeness in this new contact with antiquity. The concentration of aesthetic and partly aesthetic activity in England, France, and Germany round the year 1750, in which, as we saw, Baumgarten first gave the science its name, is exceedingly remarkable, and the Herculanean discoveries must take their place among its causes.* This interest was not confined to the Continent. Among Winckelmann’s grilmblings * at the destruction and improper restoration of many works of art in recent times, we find the complaint that lately and during his stay in Rome many noteworthy objects had been carried off to England, “ where, as Pliny says, they are banished to remote country-houses.” In Winckelmann’s own opinion there was nothing at Rome in his day belonging to the high or grand style of Greek sculpture except the (Florentine) Niobe group then in the Villa Medicis at Rome, and a Pallas “ nine palms high ” * in the Villa Albani. are«c* iv. From 1751 onwards the activity of English- proper. directed to making known the monuments of Greece proper ; and the labours and publications of many explorers* between that date and the early years of the present century no doubt marked and swelled the rising tide of interest which made it possible for Lord Elgin to conceive and carry out (in 1812) the idea of securing the Parthenon marbles for this country. It was not till about the same time that the pedi- ment sculptures from ^Egina, and the frieze from Phigaleia, ^ Gesch. d, Kunsi^ Bk. 7, i. 3. Gesch, d, Kunst^ Einleitung^ xiv. * It is fair to point out how the interest helped^ to create its own material. The fact that a prince, seeking crushed marble to make plaster for his new villa, was told by some peasants that they knew where there was plenty (Prince Elbeuf at Portici in 1709) would not in every period have led to the scientific excavation of the buried city. ^ G. d, K.^ 8, ii. 4, and see p. 245 below. • Stuart and Revell, and the explorers sent out by the Society of Dilettanti (founded 1734), continued to publish drawings and descriptions at intervals throughout this period. 194 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. became known and were brought to Germany and England respectively. The later labours of the nineteenth century, with their magnificent result, do not concern us as yet. It is of in- terest, however, to notice an aspiration of Winckelmann, which his countrymen have in late years splendidly fulfilled. “ I can- not refrain,” he writes,* “in concluding this chapter, from making known a desire which concerns the extension of our know- ledge in Greek art, as well as in scholarship and the history of that nation. This wish of mine is for a journey to Greece, not to places which many have visited, but to Elis, to which no scholar nor person skilled in art has yet penetrated. . . . What, as regards works of art, is the whole Lacedaemonian territory compared with the one town of Pisa in Elis, where the Olympic games were celebrated ? I am certain that in this place the results would be inconceivably great, and that by careful exploration of this soil a great light would dawn upon art.” Hegel, in his aesthetic lectures, which continued down to 1828, profited by some at least of the discoveries of the early nineteenth century. He makes good use* of a description of the iEginetan pediment sculptures, which was published, with notes by Schelling, in 1817. He was acquainted, at least by hearsay, with the Elgin marbles, and probably learnt much from the works of Hirt* and Meyer,* both contemporaries of Goethe and historians of art. Hirt describes in his preface how he had kept pace with the advance of archaeological knowledge from the time of his paper in “Horen” (1797), and how great the harvest of material had been during his lifetime, together with the effect which in his judgment the extended study of the actual monu- ments must necessarily have on aesthetic theory. As the passage illustrates the natural development which the idea of beauty passed through by the mere deepening and widening of experience and appreciation, it will be well to quote it at length. “No age® hais ever been more energetic and more fortunate than ours in the last fifty years [written 1833] in the discovery ^ G. d. K., 8, iii. 20. * Hegel’s ^sth., ii. 382 and 458. * GeschichU d. Bildendm Kiinstt hei den Alten, 18 ^ 3 . * Same title, 1824-36. Hirt., Gesch., etc.. Preface. hirt’s lifetime. *95 and increase of materials and in the establishment of great collections for the benefit of students. ■ Egypt, with the neighbouring countries and the Uppei Nile, have been opened up; so have Babylonia, Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor. Greece has been repeatedly explored, and its most important sculptures have passed into European museums. Zeal for the discovery of Italian antiquities has been augmented on all hands. Not merely the tombs of Sicily and Magna Graecia have surrendered their spoil, but so has the long mysterious Etruria. Then think of the metopes of Selinus, and of the most recent excavations of rare sculptures at Olympia [by the French expedition]. The excavations of the buried cities at Vesuvius continue to be fertile, together with the inexhaustible mines of Rome and the vicinity. Even more distant regions, such as the coasts of the Black Sea, France, Spain and Germany, have contributed to the mass of material ... So [owing to Hirt’s studies in Rome] I came into conflict with my predecessors Winckel- mann and Lessing, as with my contemporaries Herder and Goethe. Objective beauty was assumed to be the principle of ancient art. 1, on the contrary, pointed to the monuments, and showed by ocular demonstration that these monuments displayed all forms, the commonest and even the ugliest, as also the most beautiful, while the representation of the expression always corresponded to the character and the motives. Consequently, I maintained that the principle of ancient art was not the objectively beautiful and the soften- ing (Milderung) of expression, but simply and solely the individually significant, or characteristic, ^ whether it dealt with the ideal representation of gods and heroes, or any mean or common object.” Hitt considered the characterisation of the centaurs in the Parthenon metopes very weak compared with that in later representations of the same subject. On the other hand, he would not believe that the Parthenon pediment sculptures were of the fifth century ; he placed them, owing to their great tenderness (“ Weichheit”) of treatment, in the fourth century, which appeared to him to be the time of highest achievement in Greek sculpture. This curious perversity of judgment, as * Hirt is supposed to have been the “Characteristiker” of Goethe’s Samm- ler ». dit Seinigm, 196 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. it appears to us, arose very naturally from Hirt’s intermediate theoretical position, which was in itself untenable, although an advance on his predecessors. For, accepting with Winck- elmann and others the antithesis between beauty and ex- pression, Hirt found the essence of art not in beauty, but in expression, which, by this antithesis, is narrowed down to mean the manifestation of something quite definite in the way of individuality or action or emotion. Expressiveness of this kind is of course to be found in the later art much more decidedly than in that of the Periclean age ; and as it did not occur to Hirt to analyse “ objective beauty ” in terms of ex- pressiveness, he was obliged by his theory to prefer, as art, the monuments which really show a beginning of decadence, and to separate from their true context and refer to this later time those productions of the greatest age, in which the expressive force latent within their “objective beauty ” partly breaks through its severe self-restraint. As suggesting a con- trast to the idea of beauty, however, and forcing it out of its abstraction, his theories and observations were of the very greatest value, and like the romantic rebellion of the Schlegels and others between 1780 and 1800, really represented in the world of ideas that actual growth of material which I have been attempting to describe. It should be observed that previously to this more extended knowledge of ancient sculpture and building a very great part had been played in archaeology by coins and gems, which are more readily brought together in collections than larger plastic works. Such a collection was that of Baron v. Stosch at Florence, which Winckelmann spent nine months in cata- loguing. The evidence discussed in Lessing’s beautiful little treatise. How the Ancients Portrayed Death, consisted largely of gems. It is well known that gem-cutting (by a curious analogy with epigram-writing *) was not very active during the great fifth century at Athens, so that here again we see a reason why archaeological interest began with the later time of art, and worked back to the earlier. Enough has been said, I hope, to indicate the sort of pro- gress made in the collection of archaeological material between the Renaissance and the time of Kant, and the sort of stimu- lus which increased knowledge imparted to the theory of art. ‘ See above, p. 86. ART-.CRIT1CISM. 197 We have now to say something about the course of literary art-criticism in the same period. . 3* Art-criticism must for this purpose include on the one hand the appreciative history of art, and on the other those reflections upon* questions concerning beauty, which are not guided by a general speculative interest. Practically, as was observed above, we can only draw the line between this abstract criticism and philosophy proper by ex- cluding from the present section the views of writers who are known in philosophy otherwise than by their reflections on beauty. Ptoire comeuie. Sidney’s criticism and the structure of Shakespeare’s plays bears witness to an influence derived ultimately from classical tradition, re- acting against the formlessness of the earlier drama inherited from the middle age. In the reaction of the French seven- teenth-century theatre against Spanish influence we see a parallel phenomenon, but with less happy issues. This re- action, initiated by Malherbe, reached its first culmination in the later plays, and in the dramatic theory, of Pierre Corneille (1606-1684). It is chiefly with his theories that we are concerned. Towards the close of his life, after fifty years of work for the stage, ^ he wrote three essays on the drama; De rutiliti et des parties du po^me dramatique, De la Tragddie and Des trois unites, the purpose of which may be fairly stated in the words of the latter, “accorder les regies anciennes avec les agrdments modernes,” an expression closely analogous to that in which Lessing’s biographer states the purpose of the Dramaturgies “ to reconcile the idea of romantic poetry with the classical conception of beauty.” To Corneille, how- ever, the rules came as a prescription of indubitable authority, and he scarcely knew that the modifications which he made in applying them were really the first steps to reasoning on their merits. “ II faut, s’il se peut, nous accommoder avec elles (les rt'gles) et les amener jusqu’a nous.”* The inter- preters of Aristotle and Horace have been, he goes on to say, scholars without experience of the theatre, and have ^ Discours de Putiliti, etc. * Lessing’s Leben, Danzel, ii. 193. * Discours derutiliti, etc. 198 HISTORY OF iESTHETlC. therefore thrown little light on their real meaning. He in- tends to interpret according to his experience of the stage. The similarity between the atmosphere of Corneille’s thought and that of Lessing’s reflections, which are so often directed against him, can escape no one who has read the Discours and the Dramaturgie. Both are intent on building up a national drama from the foundations. Both were convinced that a just understanding of Aristotle’s rules was the way to set about it. Thoughts and expressions from Corneille recur in Lessing. Lessing’s scholarship indeed is to Corneille’s as an Armstrong gun to a bow and arrow ; and in place of the latter’s complacent reference almost ex- clusively to his own plays, Lessing has at command the whole range of ancient and modern drama. Corneille accepts what he takes for Aristotelian dicta as a basis on which, out of his own experience, he tries to enlarge. Lessing contends that his adherence to the supposed dicta is at least valueless, while the supposed enlargements show a real failure to appreciate the depth of Aristotle’s conceptions. And, no doubt, when Corneille explains the famous “ puri- fication ” passage in the Poetics to mean that by the pity and fear which tragedy excites we are led to avoid the passions which led to the misfortunes of the characters represented,* or when he denies that Aristotle conceived of pity and fear as necessarily interwoven in the same cause of emotion, suggest- ing that it would do quite well to have the fear without the pity, he falls an easy victim to Lessing’s triumphant criticism.* But after all, they were two of a trade ; and in some respects a reader of to-day cannot but feel that Corneille’s difficulties were too summarily disposed of by Lessing, who would never admit that a case could have been omitted by Aristotle. We saw,* for example, in treating of the Poetics, that Aristotle refuses to face the full shock of a tragic collision ; he will not allow that a thoroughly good man’s ruin can be a fitting subject for tragedy. Corneille attacks this limitation, as also that which excludes a thoroughly bad man from being the object of tragic interest. And I think that his instinct is right, though his argument is inconclusive. Lessing, who exerts^ himself to condemn Weisse’s Richard III. on ground * Dela Tragedie. * Supra, p. 19. • Dramaturgie, ii., Ixxxi. * Dramaturgie, ii., Ixxxii. 199 THE “UNITIES.” of the one limitation — he has not, so far as I know, applied his view in detail to Shakespeare’s play on the same subject — defends the other limitation also, saying,' it is a thoroughly horrible conception that there can be persons who are unhappy without any fault of their own. The heathen put this horrible thought as far from them as possible, and are we to cherish it and to enjoy dramas which confirm it, we whom religion and reason should have convinced that it is no less blas- phemous than untrue ? In all this Lessing was the child of his century “ not yet liberated by Goethe ” I am only point- ing out how close is the succession, not absolutely in all respects an advance, from Corneille to him. I cannot but think again that Corneille has the best of it in his criticism of Aristotle’s remark, that morals in tragedy ought to be good. ® And the dramatic writings show the same connection ; the same abstract characterisation, typical rather than individual ; the same submission to the rule of “ one day ” * and to the comparative unity of place, interpreted much as Corneille interprets it ; the same ingenious refinements of emotion, which have caused a comparison between Lessing and Lope de Vega,® but seem rather to indicate the direct connection with Corneille. The reformer is usually deep-dyed with that which he feels the need of reforming, and it is remarkable how powerfully the French seventeenth century worked upon the age of Lessing. Corneille, as we have seen, was not incapable of reasoning upon the supposed rules of classical form. His attitude to the unity of the day is worth noticing, because he defends it, not on the score of formal symmetry, but on the score of imitative realism. “ Beaucoup d^clament contre cette regie qu’ils nom- ment tyrannique, et auraient raison, si elle n’dtait fondle que sur I’autoritd d’Aristote ; mais ce qui la doit faire accepter, c’est la raison naturelle qui lui sert d’appui.” ® Corneille states his ' Dramaturgic, l.c * Bernays. * See Dramaturgic, ii., Ixxxiii. * I cannot think it accidental that both Minna v. Barnhehn and Emilia Galotti begin by marking the hour as early morning, so as to give time for all that has to pass before night. ‘ Lessing’s Lcben, Danzel., ii. 113. * “ Des trois unit&." It is worth noting, as we pass, that a striking sen- tence of Lessing, which introduces the long discussion on Aristotle and 300 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. '* natural reason ” as follows : the drama is an imitation or portrait of nature, and is more perfect the more it resembles it ; now “ la representation dure deux heures, et resembleroit parfaitement si Taction qu’elle represente ne demanderoit pas davantage pour sa r^alitd.” In the Cid therefore, we re- member, the unhappy hero, having fought a duel one even- ing, and having been occupied the whole of the ensuing night in repelling a night attack of the enemy, is sent off to fight another duel first thing in the morning, in spite of the reason- able remonstrance of the king, who wants it put off till the morrow ; but, owing, I imagine, to the imminent end of the theatrical " day,” can only obtain for the hero one or two hours’ breathing space. Here, no doubt, Corneille mistakes his ground altogether. The law of imitation or portrayal was understood, as we see, far more profoundly than this by Aristotle ; and experience does not show that the stage can possibly present an unre- duced reproduction of two hours taken clean out of ordinary life. Even conversation in a novel is epitomised and reduced to its essence ; a stage letter is written in a few seconds ; a stage ball may occupy perhaps an hour from the arrival to the departure of the guests ; a stage banquet is merely a sample or suggestion of the reality. I imagine that a reduc- tion of scale in the parts is as essential to the drama as to a picture ; but no doubt there is the further difficulty, as Corneille implies, that large lapses of time at any point in the drama make the reduction altogether disproportioned. The ultimate principle must surely be to avoid shocking the imagination of the spectators ; and to this he refers, advising, e.g.t that considerable lapses of time shall be between the acts, and that notes of time shall be avoided. I do not think there can be any doubt that however mis- chievous the influence of Corneille’s practice and theory may have been on the French and German theatre, their effect in drawing attention, and especially Lessing’s attention, to the antithesis of ancient rules and modern romance was a real step towards a vital co-ordination of the two. At any rate. Corneille, seems suggested by this passage, which Lessing must then have had before him. His words are ; “ Mit dem Ansehen des Aristoteles werde ich bald fertig werden, wenn ich es nur auch mit seinen Griinden zu werden wiisste.” THE FRENCH TRADITION. 201 they show us one great element of the aesthetic atmosphere into which Lessing was born, Fonteneue and To realise more completely the force and Voltaire, complacency of the tradition thus initiated, we may glance for a moment at the life of Corneille by Fonte- nelle‘ (1657-1757). A short quotation will suffice: “On recommenca alors k dtudier le th^^tre des anciens, et a soup- 90nner qu’il pouvait y avoir des regies.” “ Les regies du poeme dramatique, inconnues d’abord et mdpris^es, quelque temps apres combattues, ensuite re9ues k demi et sous des conditions, demeurent enfin mattresses du theatre. Mais r^poque de I’dtablissement de leur empire n’est proprement qu’au temps de Cinna” (1640). We may add to this from Corneille’s Discours de Putilitd, etc. : “ II faut observer I’unit^ de Taction, de lieu, et de jour, personne n’en doute,” with Voltaire’s note, “ On en doutaient tellement du temps de Corneille que ni les Anglais ni les Espagnols ne connurent cette regie. Les Italiens seuls Tobservaient. La Sophonisbe de Mairest (1604-1688) fut la premiere pidce en France oil ces trois unites parurent. La Motte, homme de beaucoup d’ esprit et de talent, mais homme i paradoxes, a dcrit de nos jours contre ces trois unites ; mais cette heresie en litt^rature n’a pas fait fortune.” These quotations from Fontenelle and Voltaire exhibit the continuity of French dramatic tradition from the seventeenth century through the eighteenth. I especially took the oppor- tunity of introducing the name of Voltaire, because in his critical and dramatic activity, the influence of which was brought into the heart of Germany by his relations with Frederick the Great, Lessing found precisely what he wanted in the way of an object to attack. I conclude this very slight reference to the immense field of French criticism, the activity of which can be seen from Corneille’s saying * that there were twelve current interpretations of Aristotle’s “ purification ” doctrine, with Lessing’s racy verdict on the whole dramatic and critical movement of which we h^ve been speaking. “Just the Same thing® happened to the French as to Gottsched [Lessing’s forerunner in Germany ; the comparison is of interest as bringing together the movements which ® Oeurres de Pierre Corneille, vol. i. ® De la Tragedie, inii. * Dramaturgie, ii. Ixxxi. 702 HISTORY OF iSSTHETIC. Lessing inherited]. Hardly had Corneille raised their theatre a little above barbarism, when they thought it all but absolutely perfect. Racine seemed to them to have put the last touch to it ; and so there was no question raised whether a tragic poet might not be yet more pathetic and more touching than Corneille and Racine ; but this was assumed to be impossible, and the aspirations of subsequent poets had to limit themselves to becoming as like one of these two as possible. For a hundred years they have de- luded themselves, and to some degree their neighbours ; but let any one tell them so, and see what they will say ! “Of the two it was Corneille who did most harm, and had the most disastrous influence on their tragic poets. For Racine misled them only by example ; Corneille both by example and by precept.” The Biitidi iii- Another set of materials which entered into WHtm. {jjg q[ aesthetic, were furnished by the British writers on beauty and art. The chief of these, as distin- guished from the philosophers in the strict sense, were Burke, Lord Kaimes, Hogarth, and Reynolds, of whom the first three exercised a traceable influence on the German movement, while the latter is of interest as championing the idea of the characteristic in a peculiar sense, intermediate between beauty and expression, and forming to some extent a point of depar- ture for the author of the Modern Painters. The works of these four writers fall almost within the de- cade following Baumgarten's first publication of part of the .^Esthetic (1750). Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty was pub- lished in England in 1753, and a year or two later was trans- lated into German by Mylius, with a preface by Lessing. Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful was first pub- lished in 1756— the complete second edition was brought out in 1757 — and Lessing was long occupied with the project ol translating it. Reynolds’ papers in the appeared 1758-9, and so far as I am aware were not known in Germany. Lord Kaimes’ (Henry Home) Elements of Criticism, appeared in 1761, and was translated into German by Meinhardt, meeting with Lessing’s warm approval.* ^ M7 authority as regards these German translations is in every case Less- ing’s Lebm (Danzel). The precise references are shown in the Index to that work under the several authors’ names. BURKE AND LORD KAIMES. 203 To all these works we might apply with much truth the criticism made by Lessing on Burke in a letter of the year 1758 : “ Although the writer’s principles are not worth much, still his book is uncommonly useful as a collection of all the occurrences and perceptions which the philosophers must assume as indisputable in inquiries of this kind. He has collected all the materials for a good system, which no one is better qualified to make use of than you” (t.g. Mendels- sohn).^ We may take Burke and Lord Kaimes together, as they have much in common, and then the two artists, whose views are related to each other as complementary opposites. Bnrke and Lord “• The fundamental point of agreement between Burke and Lord Kaimes, marking a decided ten- dency towards a new departure, is the contention carried out by Burke with perverse ingenuity, that the natural exercise of any emotion, even if painful in kind, such as an emotion of terror or of sympathetic distress, is in itself delightful,* or as Lord Kaimes most vehemently states it, a painful emotion, if not abnormally violent, is agreeable upon reflection. This view leads up to important results. Burke’s PuTga- In Burke, it is worked out in a doctrine of uonTbeoiy. “Exercise necessary for the finer organs;”* ac- cording to which as these emotions (pain and terror) “ clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome encumbrance, they are capable of producing delight.” The resemblance of this conception to the later interpretations of Aristotle’s Kadapa-lt is evident, and it niakes possible, Thesuwuneakin S- An exceedingly free treatment of the sublime to ngunesB. g^g something beside and outside the beautiful. Its connection with beauty, indeed, is, by Burke, far too completely dissolved. It is referred to ideas of pain and danger,* as those which produce the strongest of emotions, being connected as Burke strangely says, with the principle of self-preservation ; while beauty is referred to ideas of pleasure, which are con- nected with man’s social nature, it is well, however, in ^ Lessing’s Leben, i. 350. * Burke distinguishes delight from pleasure. See for the doctrine referred to in the text, Sublime and Beautiful^ sect, xiv., and Lord Kaimes* Elements of Criticism^ 97 * * Sublime and Beautiful^ sect. viL * Sublime and Beautiful^ part i, sect. vi. 204 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. bringing up new matter for theory, not to be backward in affirming its independence of the old; and although both Burke and Lord Kaimes followed Longinus and the moderns who had discussed his views, ^ yet the recognition of the sub- lime as co-ordinate with the beautiful indicates the beginning of a great enlargement in aesthetic appreciation. Reconcilia- tion of the two opposites comes later, Burke, for instance, is prepared to accept ugliness, although the exact opposite of beauty,* as partly coinciding with the sublime. This is a most important admission. Many of the qualities in which he finds the sublime, e.g., formlessness, strength, magnitude, are taken up into Kant’s treatment of the subject. painftaEeauty c. From the principle of the agreeableness of not DiBagreeabie.gygfj painful emotion, Burke obtains an ingenious reversal* of the time-honoured problem, “Why do we take pleasure in the representation of what is painful to see in reality.” The fact is not so, he replies ; real distress and disaster do not cause pure pain to the spectator, but, as expe- rience proves, fascinate and attract him. For, considered as emotions, they are “ delightful,” though painful (as we might say) in content, and a theatre where the best tragedy in the world was being acted in the best way would be emptied at once by an announcement that a state criminal of high rank was about to be executed in the next square. We seem here to have the reality regarded as a representa- tion, i.e. in abstraction from its real bearings and interest ; for, as Burke insists, no normal person wishes for such a real catastrophe as he will run to see when it takes place. So that, by a reverse movement compared with that of Plato, by elevating reality to the rank of an aesthetic semblance, instead of lowering art to the rank of useful reality, we seem to have started the suggestion that reality can be looked at aesthetically if looked at without practical interest, and there- fore that the aesthetic temper consists, in part at least, in the absence of such interest. Only, so far as art and fact remain on one level, there is no room for identifying beauty with a deeper reading of fact ; and Burke, accordingly, is quite clear that * Lord Kaimes alludes to a controversy between Boileau and Huet on the sublimity of the text, “ Let there be light,” which is referred to by Longinus. * Hublimt and Beautiful^ sect. xxi. “ On Ugliness.” * Secit. xiv. and xv. BURKE AS FORMALIST. 205 art has no advantage over nature except that which arises from our pleasure in imitation. Antidpationi of d. Other details in these writers are of historical latoridoaii. interest. The quality of grace is contrasted with that of dignity by Lord Kaimes, probably on a hint from Burke,' and is described as connected more particularly with motion, and also as peculiar to man. These ideas are fertile in later German thought, into which they passed partly through Lessing, who probably derived them from Lord Kaimes.* These two writers, again, do much to suggest the distinction between poetry and painting. Burke quotes the passage of the Iliad, in which Helen’s beauty is indicated by the effect of her appearance among the Trojan elders, contrasting® it, just in the manner of the Laocoon, which insists on this same passage, with a detailed description of a beautiful woman from Spenser. Poetry, he points out in the following section, is not strictly an imitative art ; and Lord Kaimes further insists that a picture is confined to a moment of time, and cannot take in a succession of incidents. Many other details of importance might be noticed in Burke, who has been called materialist in aesthetic, but is rather perhaps in reality a formalist, in the sense that he simply notes as irreducible elements of beauty, certain “proper- ties that operate by nature, and are less liable to be altered by caprice than any others.”* He rebels,® as Plotinus did, against the identification of beauty with proportion and fitness,® point- ^ Kaimes, i. 326 ; cf. Sublime and Beautiful,^ sect, on “ Grace.” * Lessing’s Leben^ ii. 43. Schiller’s Anmuth «. Wurde is also definitely influenced by a passage in Winckelmann, in which “ Grace ” is compared to the girdle of Aphrodite. Gesck, d. AT., 8. 2. 16. I should assume them to be independent, though the thought is fundamentally the same as in Kaimes and Lessing. 3 Sublime and Beautiful \ sect. “On effect of words.” Cf. Kaimes, 87 and Laocoon^ S. 22. ^ Sublime and Beautiful^ sect. 18. The most materialistic suggestion in Burke is reproduced, though not as a fundamental principle of aesthetic, by Lessing, when he advises the actor to study th 5 physical effects of passion on the ground that these effects, being well imitated, will tend to arouse the passion in question. Cf. Sublime and Beautiful^ Cause of Pain and Fear with Hamburg, Drarnat.y i. iii. I imagine that modern psychology tends to support this suggestion. ® Sublime and Beautiful, Part III. ii.-vi. ® “ In beauty, the effect is previous to any knowledge of the use.'’ III. vii. Cf. Kant’s definition of “ Zweckmassigskeit ohne Vorstellung eines Zweckes.” 206 HISTORY OV iESTHETIC ing out quite justly that proportion per se is simply a relation of quantity, and thus “ wholly indifferent to the mind ” (as judging of beauty). This argument is valuable as urging that not every proportion, and therefore not proportion as such, constitutes beauty ; but in pushing it to the limit of maintain- ing that in beauty there is no specially subtle orderliness, he seems to be denying what he ought to be investigating, and to be turning his back on his own important suggestions of the value of gradation or variation, and of variation of varia- tion.* Lastly, it is important to note that Lord Kaimes anticipates Lessing in pointing out the connection * between the unities of time and place, and the continuity of representation and uninterrupted presence of the chorus in Greek drama, and makes this an argument for greater freedom on the modern stage, while always demanding a certain economy of the spectator’s imagination. I do not wish it to be inferred from the space which 1 have devoted to these two critical writers, that I consider them to be aesthetic thinkers of a high rank, or that T desire to pull down Lessing from his eminence by the perpetual indication of his debt to them. The enumeration of details — and I have enumerated but a fraction of what well deserve to be men- tioned — necessarily occupies more space than the statement of a single philosophical doctrine of the very first importance. But in history we must have details ; and to me at least the concentration of influences from all quarters in the microcosm of a great intellect is one of the most fascinating problems that can be put before a historian of philosophy. Lessing himself knew well what his genius owed to his learning ; especially he sympathised with the English mind, and to be well acquainted with the English literature was to win his warm commendation. * Hocwtb. Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty was pub- lished, as we saw, three years before Burke’s Enquiry, and Hogarth is mentioned, with an approving reference to his “ line of beauty,” in Part III., sect. xiv. of the latter work. The Analysis was enthusiastically welcomed * Sublime and Beautiful, “ Variation, why beautiful” ? * Elements of Criticism^ 2. ch. 23. *‘The Three Unities.” B Lessing’s Lebtn^ ii. THE LINE OF BEAUTY. 207 by Lessing in the Vossische Zeitung in 1754.* We may conveniently attach our account of Hogarth to Lessing’s appreciation of him. In the review of 1754 (written when Lessing was only 25), he greets Hogarth’s ideas as a new light on the whole material of art, as a system calculated to reduce to certainty men’s conflicting ideas as to what is pleasing, and to abolish the wretched proverb that there is no disputing about tastes, “and as likely to make the term beauty suggest as much in the way of thought as it has hitherto suggested in the way of feeling." Later, however, in the preface to the German translation of Hogarth’s work, Lessing lays his finger on the point of difficulty in its con- ception, viz. the question of determining, on general grounds, the degree and kind of curvature that constitutes beauty of line. For Hogarth “ represents* in his first plate a number of undulating lines, of which he only takes one to merit the name of beautiful, namely that which is curved neither too much nor too little.” Lessing had an idea that a mathematical in- vestigation might solve the difficulty, which finds no answer beyond an appeal to unanalysed examples in Hogarth him- self, whose idea was suggested to him by a remark ascribed to Michael Angelo. It is worth while to distinguish, accord- ing to the view which I have adopted throughout, the two elements of the problem, which Hogarth himself industriously confuses. If the question is, whether, as a simple geometri- cal form, one line is more beautiful than other lines, this is a legitimate problem, and can be answered, within certain limits, so long as the effects of suggestive representation are excluded. And from this point of view it is of the greatest interest to contrast Hogarth’s idea of the undulating and spiral line with Plato’s conception of the most beautiful form as the straight line or the circle.® For here we have the antithesis of ancient and modern reduced to terms of the ancient or formal theory. So far as Hogarth has any general conception it is still the “ one in the many ’’ that he believes to be beauty ; but with him it is the “ intricacy,’’ the “ continuity * Lessing’s Leben^ ii. 22. Schasler must have been misled by some mis- print into supposing Hogarth’s work to have been published in 1763, and so after the inquiry. Why he put Burke’s Enquiry after Lord Kaimes’ Elements^ in opposition to his own dates, I cannot imagine. * Lessing, in the Lebcn^ 223, note. ® See p. 33 above. 208 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. of variety ” rather than the element of unity, which is the more important side. He even appeals to pure decorative design in support of this idea, describing in striking lan- guage the pleasure afforded him by the “ stick and ribbon ” ornament, which he compares with that of watching a country dance. This pure decoration, without very complex representative suggestion, is the true sphere of pure formal or geometrical beauty ; and had he sought to apply his theory within this more abstract region, he might have laid a firm analytic foundation for aesthetic inquiry. As it is he stands alone, I think, among eighteenth century writers in even alluding to this great branch of art, which presents the problems of beauty in their simplest and most general form. But going at once to the most complex of all aesthetic problems, that of the beauty of the human figure, in which suggestions of character, intellect, passion, are inextricably intermingled, he loses his way, or rather, makes no progress at all in the attempt to reduce its wealth of meaning to any one formal type or principle, and does not even attempt to show within what limits his serpentine line — the line made by twisting a wire evenly round a cone — has that degree of continuity in variety which constitutes the beautiful. The fact is, that these lower or more abstract grades of expressive form are liable to have their significance overridden by the more complex suggestions connected with life, and character, and it is not an axiom that a beautiful human figure can be constructed out of forms all of which have independently the highest geometrical beauty. Thus Hogarth’s analysis of beauty, drawn from formative art only, represents the abstract principle of unity in variety on its highest level, so as to form a point of transition to the analysis of the present century, which finds a characteristic significance in curves, for example, which vary progressively. It is against him that Burke is arguing when he disputes the im- portance of proportion and fitness in accounting for beauty. It is a fact both of interest and of importance that Hogarth’s undulating line supplied Goethe with a name for the tendency which he ranks as the polar opposite of the characteristic, when representing in a scheme * the extreme inclinations of artists. ^ Der Sammler u. die Seinigen. BEAUTY AS THE AIM OF NATURE. 209 and the central combination in which alone they produce true art. It is remarkable that in his artistic practice Hogarth himself pursues the characteristic beyond the border of ugliness. Eeynoidi T' R^y^olds’ three papers in the Idler for 1759, which form the point of departure for the chapter in Modern Painters, “ Touching the Grand Style,” * seem to be in more ways than one determined by opposition to Hogarth. “ The flowing line, which constitutes grace and beauty,” and the “pyramidal principle ”* are satirised m the first pages. And though the satire is not serious in tone, being directed against silly connoisseurship and not against any genuine theory, yet the reference in this paper to a Vandyck portrait of Charles I., which the self-styled connois- seur refuses to admire, as a “ perfect representation of the character as well as the figure of the man,” prepares the way for Reynolds’ own account of beauty. This, although fairly open to Ruskin’s criticism in as far as it derives our pleasure in beauty from mere custom, suggests an actual ground for the force of custom in this province, which Ruskin does not notice. “ Every species of the animal as well as the vegetable creation may be said to have a fixed or determinate form to- wards which Nature is continually inclining, like various lines terminating in the centre ; or it may be compared to pendulums vibrating in different directions over one central point ; and as they all cross the centre though only one passes through any other point, so it will be found that perfect beauty is oftener produced by nature, than deformity.”* It is true that Reynolds doubts whether one species is (as we should say) objectively more beautiful than another ; but he is clear that “ in creatures of the same species, beauty is the medium or centre of all various forms.” Here then we have an intermediate position. Specific char- acterisation is set against geometrical formalism on the one ^ Vol. iii. ch. I. * More clearly aimed at Hogarth are the words in No. 82 : “ but if he pre- tends to defend the preference he gives to one or the other (swan or dove) by endeavouring to prove that this more beautiful form proceeds from a particu- lar gradation of magnitude, undulation of a curve, or direction of a line. . . he will find at last that the great Mother of Nature will hot be subjected to such narrow rules.” » Idler, No. 82. 210 HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. hand, and individual characterisation on the other, and con- stitutes, historically speaking, a point of transition between the two. We shall see that even for Goethe the “ characteristic ” has some affinity with the specific type, and is opposed, in a way which strikes us as strange, to the intensified rendering of individual attributes. Plainly, the movement of natural science has played a part in the transformation of this concep- tion. Reynolds evidently thinks that a central or average form in each species represents the purpose of nature. I suppose that if we to-day could attach any meaning to a pur- pose or inclination of nature, we should interpret it dynamically, and should regard it as likely to be ahead of any existing indivi- dual forms, or at any rate as various, and incapable of exhaus- tion within a single typical or central figure. This influence must obviously force forward our conception of central or essential reality from the species to the individual, and from the " invariable ” to the law of variation, which is itself a kind of invariable. Finally it is a curious anticipation of the German “ period of genius ” that Reynolds contends for the rights of genius e^ainst the tendency, exemplified in Hogarth, to attach prac- tical importance to critical rules. In all these — in Hogarth’s development of antique formalism, in Burke’s acceptance of the sublime as a complement to the beautiful, and in his revolt against the worship of mere proportion, in Lord Kaimes' ad- mission of the painful within the sphere of the agreeable, and his desire to emancipate the modern drama from the rigid unities of space and time, and in Reynolds’ effort to dissociate the grand style from decorative formalism, and explain it with reference to a normal or central “ inclination of nature ” ex- pressed by specific characterisation — in all this we find embodied the antithesis of abstract and concrete expressiveness, forced upon the modern world by the mere fact of its contrast with the ancient, and especially with the very abstract tradition by which that ancient world was represented to it. Ctamami iMfore We have now very briefly to trace the con- flicting elements in which this same contrast of ancient rule and modern expressiveness existed in Germany, before it Wcis resolved into a vital and progressive aesthetic by Lessing and his contemporaries. The time — the early eighteenth century — wais in Germany one of immense and varied activity, in which foreign A GERMAN DRAMA. 2II material, both French and English, was being eagerly appro- priated, and was producing strangely diverse effects on the inexperienced genius of the nation. The few observations by which I shall try to focus this animated scene as a back- ground for the representation of Lessing’s and Winckelmann’s ccsthetic achievements will be, even more than the rest of this work, devoid of all claims to full historical adequacy, and will merely select those leading and causal tendencies which bear directly on the growth of aesthetic perception. The two great critical problems which Lessing inherited from the generation immediately before him were, a, The relation of a German national drama to the pseudo-classical French theatre, and consequently to the true mind of anti- quity which this latter parodied ; this was the essential subject of his Dramaturgie ; and /8, The value of strictly descriptive or pictorial poetry, a species of art which marked both the classical decadence and the first flush of the modern senti- mental interest in nature, and which seemed to be justified by the voice of antiquity, and by a misunderstanding of the tradition that art lay in the imitation of natural objects. The relation between poetic and pictorial beauty is the subject of the Laocoon. The former question is chiefly connected at this epoch with the name of Gottsched ; the latter with the poetry and theories of Bodmer and Breitinger, the “ Swiss ” or the Zurich critics. I will speak of these two sects, as in fact they were, very shortly, with reference to these problems. a. Gottsched ( 1 700-1766) was lecturing at Leip- aottached. • • ^ i ' t • ' » *1 i i t i SIC m 1 746, when Lessing matriculated there, both on the History of Philosophy, using as a text- book his own Elements, which is said to have been a Wolffian compendium, and on “ Poetik, ad critices sanioris normam,” “ the art of poetry in conformity with a sounder criti- cism.” * He represented in Germany a similar reaction against utter formlessness in the drama, to that which we have observed to take place both in ngland and in France. He set himself the task of creating a German literature, and more especially a German drama, worthy to rank with that of other nations. In attempting this, with the whole weight of his position at Leipzig, then a leading literary centre, of ^ Lessing’s Leben^ i. 51. 212 HISTORY OF iSSTHETIC extreme industry, both on his own part and on that of his circle, in original writing, in translation, and in journalism, and of his friendship with an important society of actors (Neuber’s), who accepted the new plays in French taste which he pre- scribed, and were imitated in their submission by the ordinary travelling companies, he succeeded for good or evil in banish- ing the coarse and wild popular dramas of the later seven- teenth century with the clown and the Faust, and replacing them by plays of French origin, or on French models, repre- senting the ideas of classical taste and correctness then current in the literary world. The Deutsche Schaubilhne (1740- 1 745) was the collection of plays, both original and translated, which he issued as an instrument of his enterprise.' Lessing, who relied on the Greeks and on Shakespeare as his guides in dramatic questions, appears to have condemned this interruption of German development by French influence as a wholly false departure. “ No one will deny,” a contem- porary periodical had alleged,* “ that the German stage owes a great part of its earlier improvements to Professor Gott- sched.” “ I am that no one,” rejoins Lessing ; “ I deny it altogether. It were to be wished that Gottsched had never meddled with the theatre. His supposed improvements either concern the most utter trifles, or are actually changes for the worst. He did not," Lessing continues, “ aim at improving the ancient German theatre, but at creating a new one. And what sort of a new one 1 Why, a Frenchified one ; without considering whether this Frenchified drama Weis suitable to the German mind.” Lessing’s biographers, exceedingly careful students of the German eighteenth century, do not assent to this extreme view. Admitting that there was a natural kinship between the great English dramatists and the popular German drama of the seventeenth century, they yet deny that the latter could of itself have developed into a true national dramatic literature cognate with that of England, On the contrary, they main- tain with great show of reason that Lessing’s conception of his problem, to establish a national theatre on the principles of Aristotle and Shakespeare, only became possible after, and because of, the work of Gottsched in bringing the German drama into some kind of literary form.* ^ Encyl, Brit., art. “Gottsched.” * Lessing’s Lthen, i. 439. • Lessing’s Lthtn, i. 103, 438-7. A GERMAN DRAMA. 213 It must further be remarked that Gottsched, in his anxiety to prove that there was, and therefore could be, a German drama, and to bring all influences to bear upon remodelling it, called attention to the older plays, of whose form he entirely disapproved, by his historical notices of them in the “ Nothiger Vorrath zur Geschichte der Deutschen drama- tischen Dichtkunst (materials for a history of German dra- matic poetry), and both himself, and through his wife, an indefatigable authoress and translator, brought much of real value to the knowledge of the German public. Thus Ma- dame Gottsched translated Moliere’s Misanthrope, the whole of the English Spectator, and Pope’s Rape of the Lock. Of Gottsched’s dramatic theorising I give a single speci- men, from his rules for the construction of a tragic plot.* “ The poet selects a moral doctrine, which he desires to im- press upon his readers in a sensuous form. For this pur- pose he devises the general framework of a story, such as to exhibit the truth of the doctrine. Then he searches in history for famous persons to whom incidents occurred somewhat similar to those of his story, and borrows their names for the personages of his plot in order to give them distinction.” Lessing remarks on this that if the Hercules Furens contains any such doctrine, it must either be that virtue and heroism are an increased provocation to an angry Deity, or that one should avoid being a natural son of Zeus if one wants to escape the persecution of Hera» Lessing seems always just a little too clever. Even the English reader, if he knows Browning’s translation of the Heracles, especially the chorus “ Even a dirge,” will be inclined to demur to the substance of Lessing’s criticism no less than to the form of Gottsched’s prescription. Yet Lessing himself retained throughout, and in some degree bequeathed even to Goethe, the pseudo-clas- sical and moralistic traditions of Corneille and Gottsched. And it is necessary to express a very serious doubt whether the enterprise in which not only Gottsched, but Lessing, Schiller and Goethe spent the best* of their strength, the establishment of a German national drama, can be held to have thoroughly succeeded. Whether Faust is a sufficient reward to the world for the labours of several great men through two-thirds of a century, might well be questioned, if * Gottsched, Kritischt Dichtkunst, quoted in Lessing’s Leben, i. 184. 214 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. it were worth while to quarrel with the course of history. The outcome of their labours, it may be held, was great in- deed, but was not what they sought. The real German national art, the art of music, grew up of itself behind their backs while they were aiguing about painting and poetry. What they did create by their deep and energetic study of the best utterances of mind and the best thoughts about those utterances, was not German art, but German philosophy. ite-awtaB.” ^ “Swiss” critics and poets Bodmer and Breitinger, almost exactly Gottsched’s contempora- ries, with their friends and partisans, represent an influence on the whole opposed to that of Gottsched. In them the meeting of extremes, the sense of a unity between ancient and modern life, which was the sign of a deeper criticism and truer sense of beauty, began to show itself, though in a weak and super- ficial form, which gives a faint augury of the age of Goethe. Wieland, 1733-1813, who in his youth was a friend of the Swiss,* and who lived to be satirized by Goethe, may be taken as a measure of the difference between the culture of the two periods. The Swiss critics stood up for Homer, Milton, Ariosto,* against Gottsched’s pseudo-classicism, which allied itself, as a mechanical system of rules, with a narrow rational- ism, attacking, for example, the use of the marvellous in Homer and Milton. The openness of interest which gave them this power of sympathy with really great art, attracted them also to a modern type of poetry which though great things came of it afterwards, at first declared itself with a good deal of con- fusion in its aims. Sentimentalism, such as that of Klop- stock,® whom the Zurich critics had influenced, and in whom they at first believed, and the interest in peasant life and romantic scenery, came together in their minds. Pictorial poetry was stimulated by Thomson’s Seasons, which Brocker * was translating between 1740 and 1750, and was commended by them in theory,® and produced, after Haller, by Kleist (Fruhling, 1749) and Gessner (Idylls, 1756) who was a painter as well as poet. ^ Scherer, ii. 41. * Scherer, ii. 24 ; Lessing’s Leberiy ii. 18. * Scherer, ii. 31. * Scherer, ii. 38. * In Breitinger’s Dichikunsty Lessing’s Leben^ ii. t8. SUCCESSORS OF THE SWISS. 215 In speaking of Archaeology I referred to the works of Spence and Caylus, which betray the idea that the difference of medium between painting and poetry makes no serious difference in the scope of those two arts, and this conception appears to have been generally current in the age before Lessing, although it found special expression in the criticism and poetry of the Zurich circle. The Laocoon, it is said, was aimed primarily at the Swiss, ^ as the Dramaturgic at Gott- sched, Corneille, Voltaire ; we have only to modify this by remembering that Winckelmann himself was at first a dis- ciple of the Swiss, and that in his early work “ on the imita- tion of Greek painting and sculpture" (1755) he actually says “ that the limits of painting may be as wide as those of poetry, and that it is possible for the painter to follow the poet, just as it is for the musician,* Certainly, as Lessing’s biographer observes, it sounds very much as if this sentence had suggested the second title of the Laocoon, “ Of the limits of poetry and painting.” Before passing on, however, we must note that the Swiss genius, and the impulse of Thomson’s poetry, were not ex- hausted in the crude thought and fancy that helped to elicit the Laocoon. Rousseau {1712-1778) and De Saussure ( 1 740- 1799) inherited the same genius in more powerful forms. The antagonism of Rousseau and Voltaire reproduces on a higher level that of Breitinger and Gottsched ; and Rousseau is the true inaugurator of modern romantic naturalism. It seems worth while to illustrate the many-sided influence of Rousseau outside revolutionary politics by a quotation from Amiel, himself too a native of Geneva. “J. J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he who founded travelling on foot before Topffer, reverie before Ren6, literary botany before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de St. Pierre, the democratic theory before the revolution of 1789, political discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the science of teaching before Pesta- lozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure." . . . “ Nobody, again, has had more influence than he upon the nineteenth century, for Byron, Chiteaubriand, Madame de Stael and George Sand all descend from him,* * T.essing’s Leben. * Quoted Lessing’s L(ben, ii. 20. * hrd\A, Journal Intime, E. Tr., i. 202. 2I6 HISTORY OF iESTHETIC. If Rousseau was the first nature-sentimentalist, De Saussure, also a native of Geneva, was the first student-mountaineer. We can hardly realise to-day the void of knowledge and feeling in the time before 1787, when Mont Blanc was ascended by De Saussure, and also by another traveller, having never, it appears, been ascended before. In De Saussure, as all readers of the Modem Painters ' are aware, we have an influence that has operated powerfully in impressing on the modern sense of Alpine beauty its peculiar character of loving and penetrating study, which involves the reconciliation of the scientific and artistic spirit, and is the root of our singular delight in obser- vant sympathy with the characteristic law and essence of mountain conformation. V. I am convinced that Lessing ought to be treated in the' history of aesthetic before Winckel- mann, and not in the reverse order, which Schasler adopts. The mere dates of their lives and writings are not decisive. Winckelmann was indeed born twelve years before Lessing, and his assassination took place thirteen years before Lessing’s death. It is also true that Lessing’s Laocoon takes its text from an early work of Winckelmann, and mentions before its close his