mula, comprehensive and consistently held to, which is to serve as a key to the understanding of the facts and problems of aesthetics. It is the first in Nietzsche, Romain Rolland, and Remy de Gourmont; the second in writers like Plato, Hegel, and Croce. Both ends have their opportunities and their dangers. Nietzsche rises to art as flashily and capriciously as a trout to a fly; the waters of his reflection show swift currents and pools, swirls and eddies, clear depths and foam, and not a few tangles and rocks. He combines the virtues of boldness and reach with the vice of inconsistent, uncorrelated thinking.

A world formula as a key to aesthetics has come to be distrusted. We are too intent on keeping close to the facts of experience to accept sweeping discussions of absolute beauty, reality, ideals; and to enjoy a ghostly singlestick contest among the clouds. If after the manner of Wolff feeling is defined as confused thought, and experience is intellectualized in a high-handed manner, the burden of this original sin must rest heavily on aesthetics. Or if the latter is forced within the frame of the Kantian critical philosophy, and the dichotomy of rational self and sense self is driven into the problem of the sublime, a barren formalism and a twisting of facts result. Plato, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Bergson all show, in one way or another, the dangers of a world philosophy autocratically used in construing the facts of aesthetic experience.

There is no discounting Plato's knowledge of art or the delicacy and quickness of his response to beauty. He is a student of the technique of music, if a somewhat unsympathetic critic of its innovations. He shows flashes of insight in his remarks on poetry, painting, and sculpture. But even the hastiest reading of the Republic and the Laws

cases we may quarrel with the result-his theories stand in need of revision-but we ought to applaud the attempt to combine what is valuable in the commonsense method with something that is quite as necessary.

reveals him discussing art as a moralist or a metaphysician. When he assumes the role of a moralist, he takes his stand on empirical ground-the observed effects of various types and forms of art. Certain kinds of music evoke amorous, others, martial moods; vocal music is to be preferred to instrumental, for it can readily be made the carrier of religious or patriotic ideas and feelings, as in community choruses; Homer and the comic poets are demoralizing; tragedy "waters" instead of starving the passions. These judgments are in turn bound up with a general theory of what human nature is and society ought to be. Back of his attacks on tragedy is the belief that to incite and indulge the passions is to slip into a primitive, pre-rational mode of living. When he writes as a metaphysician he forces on art his theory of reality and a sharp sundering of the two worlds, of eternal types, and of appearance. Not only does he limit art to this second world of everyday experience and deny it the power to render or interpret reality, but discredits it still further by holding it to be an imperfect copy of this imperfect world-a system, in fact, of surface illusions. He goes to the lengths of attempting a metaphysical classification of the arts. Plato's theory of absolute beauty has little to do with art; it takes us straight to the devotional exercises of a great idealist-and leaves us there.

Hegel vindicates the dignity of art and, in opposition to Plato, assigns it the task of revealing reality in sensuous form. He defines beauty as Geist, or Spirit, shining through and illumining the world of sense. He substitutes for Plato's immobile world of Ideas a developmental theory of reality and devises a method which allows an ingenious use of concrete materials. But is it not, after all, a strange treatment he gives to art? There is something at once fascinating and disconcerting in the spectacle of this intellectual giant, so fond of dramatic interplays and com

plications, footing the intricate path of the dialectic method and dragging along an art bound hand and foot and burdened with metaphysics. Many of his aesthetic theories are of value. His analysis of symbolic and romantic art is worthwhile; his theory of tragedy is illuminating; his discussion of the artist and of the sources and means of artistic expression repays close study. But the twist of an extreme philosophical method is undeniably present. No patient student of the history of art will accept the Hegelian method of classifying and setting in motion the several arts; no careful and sympathetic analyst of beauty, as it is so individually and variedly revealed in works of art, will weight himself at the outset with such a definition of beauty as Hegel gives. The work of men like Vischer, Carrière, and Rosenkranz reveals the disastrous results of Hegelianizing aesthetics.

Schopenhauer, with an entirely different world formula as his key, commits the like mistake of forcing on aesthetics an uncongenial and disconcerting method. Three theories of his may be cited in proof: his theory of tragedy in terms of resignation, which is untrue to the facts of experience; his fantastic criticism of still life painting as stimulating instead of suppressing the will; his analysis of classical architecture in terms of an undisguised struggle between support and burden.

Bergson, too, illustrates the dangers of the philosophical method. In his study of the comic he lays claim to walking the way of empiricism. He means to observe disinterestedly the many types of the comic, and to get what he can from such intellectual watchfulness. His selection and interpretation of facts are everywhere dominated by the contrast between the living and the inert, between life, a non-repeating series, and mechanism, a series whose very essence is repetition.

THE CULTURAL METHOD

The term is meant to include the older method of Taine and the newer method of Grosse, Groos, and other social students of art. Old or new, the method sets itself the task of studying art as a thing physically and socially conditioned. It sets itself against philosophy and turns to science. Art has its roots in social life: what it is and what it bears depend on the nature of the soil, on such cultivation as is given by custom and tradition, and on the favoring trend of taste. Why then not make a scientific survey of these influences?

Taine was the first to make the attempt consistently and on a large scale. In offering a "botanizing" theory of art, he makes much of four influences: race, climate, milieu, and the peculiar bent, or genius of the artist. No work of art, be it a painting, a drama or a novel, can be understood apart from the individual genius who created it, and the race that is active in and through him; apart also from the climate, the intellectual and social cast of the age, and the prevailing taste. In response to what he considered a scientific ideal and method, Taine attempted to seize upon the cultural influences in English literature and in the great schools of painting.

It may at once be granted that race, climate, milieu, and genius are determinants of the character of art. Winckelmann, a lover of art in the concrete and a scientific student not given to generalities, was forced to consider climate and political and social conditions in his history of art. At this point or that, in the study of Greek tragedy, in the appreciation of Dutch painting or of medieval architecture, in the understanding of Chinese poetry or of the Hindu drama, a wide cultural orientation is necessary.

Unfortunately three at least of these determinants, race, climate, and genius, are too indefinite to be of much use.

The same race and climate have produced artists amazingly different; and genius appears sometimes as the exquisite flower of taste gained by the process of natural selection of which Taine speaks, sometimes capriciously, a law to itself. As for the milieu, or social setting, it is, at the point where Taine uses it, too complex to be of much value. So various are the forces at work in modern society, so different is their impact on different human material, and their penetrating power, that art movements of all types and radically contrasted art works are possible in the same cultural setting. The remedy would be to carry investigation back to simpler social situations, but Taine lacks interest in and knowledge of primitive art. He insists that it is his purpose "to realize not an ode but a law," but his theory is only quasi-scientific. At its heart there is a good deal of rhetoric, not so much as there is in Schiller, Herder, Croce, and Faure, but still too much.

Within the last fifty years the social sciences have forced a reinterpretation of the term culture. Empirical in point of view and method, they have moved away from the large formulas and brilliant rhetoric of a Schiller or a Hegel and from the uncritically scientific interpretations of a Taine as well. They show an interest in the early stages of cultural development-crude art is not cast aside-and they have the advantage of a mass of material, carefully gathered and inspected, which may be used to give content, point, and color to the reading of the culture of this or that group, this or that age. Theirs is the further advantage of an increased knowledge of human dynamics-of impulses and interests as they interrelatedly shape and sway human life. They have gone to school with modern biology and have adopted the genetic method.

One important result of this advance as it affects aesthetics has been a marked interest shown in primitive art, as that art is related to early cultural conditions and to later