eaver chip" this it throws the many-sidedness of both art and the aesthetic response in sharp relief. It follows the struggle between tradition and revolt; and makes a study of great diverging preferences, such as naturalism and idealism, classicism and romanticism. If it is ambitious, it invades the aesthetic consciousness of the Oriental; if it is wise, it is comparative within a narrower field—a field which, narrow as it is, holds a perplexing range of perceptions and standards of beauty. In all this work aesthetics moves within a tangle of methods and with a frequent shift of emphasis. This is a comprehensive program, and a loose one as well. At some future time aesthetics may show a well-knit strength and trim activity within a field of whose topography and limits there can be no doubt; at present it is little more than a group of problems. But this by no mean destroys its value, for each of these problems is rich in possibilities and relations. Each challenges illuminative and correlating thought. If the most is to be made of them, aesthetics must not be reduced to a chapter in psychology or a bit of sociology. There is little to choose between an aesthetics bound in the boards of a philosopher's system and stamped with the gilt letters of arrogance, and the loose, fluttering scraps of the anthropologist. Its true domain lies somewhere between these extremes. THE METHODS OF AESTHETICS A method is a means of attaining desired results; and a good method gains such results in the soundest, most forceful, least wasteful way. It is a common mistake to hold that there is only one good method for every problem. There are many effective ways of conducting a campaign or winning a battle or handling scientifically a group of facts. Whenever what is in question is a comprehensive problem which turns out to be a mass of concrete, definitely limited problems, apparently unrelated, there is need of a flexible, resourceful technique of control. Thus winning a war involves financing, provisioning, sanitation, transporting as well as a successful military use of men; and the latter in turn depends on the ground chosen, the massing and marching, the knowledge of when to join in and when to avoid battle. Every science has its field and its range of problems. Its success is in great part one of methodology. Aesthetics is hampered by heterogeneous material ranging from beauty embodied in art to the creative processes that call it into being; from social to personal values; from origins to aims; from broad aesthetic types to highly individualized technique and effects. In such a situation only the readiest shifting and combining can be of service. What often happens, however, is that the aesthetician, in response to some bias, commits himself to one method, inflexibly used, and either forces everything into its scheme or limits himself to material to which it naturally applies. Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is an illustration of the first procedure; anthropological aesthetics, of the second. The leading methods of aesthetics must be passed in re view; their nature marked and their history traced; and the point indicated where they may become an autocratic menace. THE COMMONSENSE METHOD The commonsense method takes it for granted that the quality of good art can be seen and the essentials grasped by anyone who is alert, observing, emotionally and imaginatively responsive, and not unintelligent. It is a series of markings and casual readings in the volume of art, as that volume reveals agreements and differences in the use of colors, the organization of lines, the uses of rhythm, and in artistic ideals. Some painters use a contrasted color scheme; others a tonal scheme with one dominant color delicately shaded. Which is the more effective? Does the value of a landscape vary with the size of the picture? Many of the old masters used the circle and the serpentine; Cézanne simplifies in terms of straight and broken lines. Renoir's bodies are given a plastic rounding. Does painting gain by such a sculpturesque technique? His trees and shrubs are bursts of color and rhythm; accurately observed they are not; neither are Turner's castles. Ought surfaces in sculpture to be smooth and color in painting clear, persuasive, and pure? How much of his compactness and incisiveness does Dante owe to the closed verse-form he uses? What of the color schemes and favorite designs of this or that painter? These are samples of such ques tioning observation. The method is an old one. Aristotle uses it when he says that beauty must have a certain magnitude since we do not call very small things beautiful; much of his dramatic criticism and many of his remarks on the epic are nothing but commonsense comment of a shrewd and direct type. Longinus illustrates it when he enumerates the qualities of the sublime, the frigid, the bombastic, or when he contrasts the oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero. No Homeric controversies can in any way impair the value of his contrast of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He is constantly saying things worthwhile in the spirit of an appreciative observer and analyst, and marking the here and there of beauty; but he never gets to the point of developing a general theory. The method may be seen in most instructive form in the work of certain eighteenth century Englishmen :-Hogarth, Reynolds, Lord Kaimes, and Burke. These men all kept in close touch with art; they studied the practice of painters and sculptors and poets; they observed and suggested. Burke states that smoothness, small size, and a variety of curves mark beautiful objects. Hogarth selects regularity, unity, variety; and justifies his choice of the serpentine as the line of beauty by pointing to its use in Raphael. Lord Kaimes stresses proportion and order as marks of beauty, and vastness as a mark of the sublime. What is the value of such a method? It starts at the right point-art in its single creations-and adopts the right attitude-that of an interested observer. If sublime objects are usually vast and beautiful objects smooth and delicate or if, as Bergson maintains, the comic is not found outside the sphere of the human, why not say so and make the most of such empirical markings off and commonsense orientations? It is the only method available in some problems; and it plays a not unimportant part in even so ambitious a work as Volkelt's System der Aesthetik. It is often all there is to art criticisms. But there are dangers lurking in the method. It tends to stop short of a science and a philosophy of the beautiful. Commonsense is uncritical of its data; it is superficial in its observations and fragmentary, and too easily contented in its analysis. Resting its case on common impressions, it tells us that the circle is the most beautiful figure; that squares are more pleasing than triangles and curves more pleasing than straight lines; it points to the disquieting effect of certain sounds and colors, and to the attractiveness of certain designs and color combinations. But these facts must be tested and verified; and this cannot be done except under a system of scientific controls such as an experimental psychological method offers. Otherwise they are little more than reasonable guesses. Again, the commonsense method is too neglectful of philosophical implications and too slack in its thinking. As Thomas Reid, the commonsense philosopher, suggests, it may be impossible to discover a common element in the beauties of the several arts; but such scepticism requires a most careful grounding. Certain problems of aesthetics— the relation of art to life, the nature of the tragic or the comic, the aims and methods of idealism-are definitely philosophical; and every one of its problems, however concrete and detached they may appear to be, imperiously calls for the penetrating, supplementing, and unifying activities of the philosopher. One problem cannot be raised without raising a host of others. Artists have understood this:-Leonardo in his note-books; Hebbel in his diaries; Whistler and Rodin in their remarks on painting and sculpture. The critic and the aesthetician ought to see that only in this way can they avoid a truncated aesthetics or a "commonplace book" of facts and questionable reflection! 1 THE PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 1 The philosophical method ranges from enfolding, illuminating thought applied to single problems, to a world for 1 Lessing, a keen observer and thoroughgoing analyst, is always in search of general points of view. In the Hamburgische Dramaturgie he is not content with casual criticisms, but pushes on to the profoundest problems of tragedy. In the Laocoon he has built out constructively the scattered and superficial material he found in Burke, Kaimes, and others. In both |