own book to convince oneself of the justice of this ob servation of his. On the same subject the French writer Véron, in the preface to his very good work on æsthetics, says: "Il n'y a pas de science, qui ait été plus que l'esthétique livrée aux rêveries des métaphysiciens. Depuis Platon jusqu' aux doctrines officielles de nos jours, on a fait de l'art je ne sais quel amalgame de fantaisies quintessenciées, et de mystères transcendantaux qui trouvent leur expression suprême dans la conception absolue du Beau idéal, prototype immuable et divin des choses réelles" ("L'Esthétique,” 1878, p. 5).1 1 If the reader will only be at the pains to peruse the following extracts, defining beauty, taken from the chief writers on æsthetics, he may convince himself that this censure is thoroughly deserved. I shall not quote the definitions of beauty attributed to the ancients, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc., down. to Plotinus, because, in reality, the ancients had not that conception of beauty separated from goodness which forms the basis and aim of æsthetics in our time. By referring the judgments of the ancients on beauty to our conception of it, as is usually done in æsthetics, we give the words of the ancients a meaning which is not theirs.2 CHAPTER III I BEGIN with the founder of æsthetics, Baumgarten (1714-1762). According to Baumgarten,3 the object of logical 1 There is no science which, more than æsthetics, has been handed over to the reveries of the metaphysicians. From Plato down to the received doctrines of our day, people have made of art a strange amalgam of quintessential fancies and transcendental mysteries, which find their supreme expression in the conception of an absolute ideal Beauty, immutable and divine prototype of actual things. 2 See on this matter Benard's admirable book, "L'Esthétique d'Aristote," also Walter's "Geschichte der Esthetik in Altertum." 8 Schasler, p. 361. knowledge is Truth, the object of aesthetic (i.e. sensu ous) knowledge is Beauty. Beauty is the Perfect (the Absolute) recognized through the senses; Truth is the Perfect perceived through reason; Goodness is the Perfect reached by moral will. Beauty is defined by Baumgarten as a correspondence, i.e. an order of the parts in their mutual relations to each other and in their relation to the whole. The aim of beauty itself is to please and excite a desire, "Wohlgefallen und Erregung eines Verlangens." (A position precisely the opposite of Kant's definition of the nature and sign of beauty.) With reference to the manifestations of beauty, Baumgarten considers that the highest embodiment of beauty is seen by us in nature, and he therefore thinks that the highest aim of art is to copy nature. (This position also is directly contradicted by the conclusions of the latest æstheticians.) ten, Passing over the unimportant followers of BaumgarMaier, Eschenburg, and Eberhard,-who only slightly modified the doctrine of their teacher by divid ing the pleasant from the beautiful, I will quote the definitions given by writers who came immediately after Baumgarten, and defined beauty quite in another way. These writers were Sulzer, Mendelssohn, and Moritz. They, in contradiction to Baumgarten's main position, recognize as the aim of art, not beauty, but goodness. Thus Sulzer (1720-1777) says that only that can be con sidered beautiful which contains goodness. According to his theory, the aim of the whole life of humanity is welfare in social life. This is attained by the education of the moral feelings, to which end art should be subservient. Beauty is that which evokes and educates this feeling. Beauty is understood almost in the same way by Mendelssohn (1729-1786). According to him, art is the carrying forward of the beautiful, obscurely recognized by feeling, till it becomes the true and good. The aim of art is moral perfection.1 1 Schasler, p. 369. For the æstheticians of this school, the ideal of beauty is a beautiful soul in a beautiful body. So that these æstheticians completely wipe out Baumgarten's division of the Perfect (the Absolute), into the three forms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; and Beauty is again united with the Good and the True. But this conception is not only not maintained by the later æstheticians, but the æsthetic doctrine of Winckelmann arises, again in complete opposition. This divides the mission of art from the aim of goodness in the sharpest and most positive manner, makes external beauty the aim of art, and even limits it to visible beauty. According to the celebrated work of Winckelmann (1717-1767), the law and aim of all art is beauty only, beauty quite separated from and independent of goodness. There are three kinds of beauty: (1) beauty of form, (2) beauty of idea, expressing itself in the position of the figure (in plastic art), (3) beauty of expression, attainable only when the two first conditions are present. This beauty of expression is the highest aim of art, and is attained in antique art; modern art should therefore aim at imitating ancient art.1 Art is similarly understood by Lessing, Herder, and afterwards by Goethe and by all the distinguished æstheticians of Germany till Kant, from whose day, again, a different conception of art commences. Native æsthetic theories arose during this period in England, France, Italy, and Holland, and they, though not taken from the German, were equally cloudy and contradictory. And all these writers, just like the German æstheticians, founded their theories on a conception of the Beautiful, understanding beauty in the sense of a something existing absolutely, and more or less intermingled with Goodness or having one and the same root. In England, almost simultaneously with Baumgarten, even a little earlier, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke, Hogarth, and others, wrote on art. According to Shaftesbury (1670-1713), "That which is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, what is 1Schasler, pp. 388-390. harmonious and proportionable is true, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of consequence agreeable and good." Beauty, he taught, is recognized by the mind only. God is fundamental beauty; beauty and goodness proceed from the same fount. So that, although Shaftesbury regards beauty as being something separate from goodness, they again merge into something inseparable. According to Hutcheson (1694-1747-"Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue"), the aim of art is beauty, the essence of which consists in evoking in us the perception of uniformity amid variety. In the recognition of what is art we are guided by "an internal sense.' This internal sense may be in contradiction to the ethical one. So that, according to Hutcheson, beauty does not always correspond with goodness, but separates from it and is sometimes contrary to it.2 " According to Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), beauty is that which is pleasant. Therefore beauty is defined by taste alone. The standard of true taste is that the maximum of richness, fullness, strength, and variety of impression should be contained in the narrowest limits. That is the ideal of a perfect work of art. According to Burke (1729-1797-" Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful"), the sublime and beautiful, which are the aim of art, have their origin in the promptings of selfpreservation and of society. These feelings, examined in their source, are means for the maintenance of the race through the individual. The first (self-preservation) is attained by nourishment, defense, and war, the second (society) by intercourse and propagation. Therefore self-defense, and war, which is bound up with it, is the source of the sublime; sociability, and the sex-instinct, which is bound up with it, is the source of beauty.3 1 Knight, "Philosophy of the Beautiful," i., pp. 165, 166. 2 Schasler, p. 289. Knight, pp. 168, 169. 3 R. Kralik," Weltschönheit, Versuch einer allgemeinen Esthetik," pp. 304-306, Such were the chief English definitions of art and beauty in the eighteenth century. During that period, in France, the writers on art were Père André and Batteux, with Diderot, D'Alembert, and, to some extent, Voltaire, following later. According to Père André ("Essai sur le Beau, 1741), there are three kinds of beauty, - divine beauty, natural beauty, and artificial beauty.1 According to Batteux (1713-1780), art consists in imitating the beauty of nature, its aim being enjoyment.2 Such is also Diderot's definition of art. The French writers, like the English, consider that it is taste that decides what is beautiful. And the laws of taste are not only not laid down, but it is granted that they cannot be settled. The same view was held by D'Alembert and Voltaire.3 According to the Italian æsthetician of that period, Pagano, art consists in uniting the beauties dispersed in nature. The capacity to perceive these beauties is taste, the capacity to bring them into one whole is artistic genius. Beauty commingles with goodness, so that beauty is goodness made visible, and goodness is inner beauty.1 According to the opinion of other Italians: Muratori (1672-1750),-"Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le science e le arti,". and especially Spaletti,5 "Saggio sopra la bellezza" (1765),-art amounts to an egotistical sensation, founded (as with Burke) on the desire for self-preservation and society. Among Dutch writers, Hemsterhuis (1720-1790), who had an influence on the German æstheticians and on Goethe, is remarkable. According to him, beauty is that which gives most pleasure, and that gives most pleasure which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time. Enjoyment of the beautiful, because it gives the greatest quantity of perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest notion to which man can attain. 1 Knight, p. 101. 8 Knight, pp. 102-104. Spaletti, Schasler, p. 328. 2 Schasler, p. 316. |