Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

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When we have accorded to Steinthal the great merit of having rendered
coherent the ideas of Humboldt, and of having clearly separated
linguistic from logical thought, we must note that he too failed to
perceive the _identity_ of the internal form of language, or "intuition
of the intuition," as he called it, with the aesthetic _imagination_.
Herbart's psychology, to which Steinthal adhered, did not afford him any
means for this identification. Herbart separated logic from psychology,
calling it a normative science; he failed to discern the exact limits
between feeling and spiritual formation, psyche or soul, and spirit, and
to see that one of these spiritual formations is logical thought or
activity, which is not a code of laws imposed from without. For Herbart,
Aesthetic, as we know, was a code of beautiful formal relations. Thus
Steinthal, following Herbart in psychology, was bound to look upon Art
as a beautifying of thought, Linguistic as the science of speech,
Rhetoric and Aesthetic as the science of beautiful speech.

Steinthal never realized that to speak is to speak well or beautifully,
under penalty of _not_ speaking, and that the revolution which he and
Humboldt had effected in the conception of language must inevitably
react upon and transform Poetic, Rhetoric, and Aesthetic.

Thus, despite so many efforts of conscientious analysis on the part of
Humboldt and of Steinthal, the unity of language and of poetry, and the
identification of the science of language and the science of poetry
still found its least imperfect expression in the prophetic aphorisms of
Vico.

The philosophical movement in Germany from the last quarter of the
eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth, notwithstanding
its many errors, is yet so notable and so imposing with the philosophers
already considered, as to merit the first place in the European thought
of that period. This is even more the case as regards Aesthetic than as
regards philosophy in general.

France was the prey of Condillac's sensualism, and therefore incapable
of duly appreciating the spiritual activity of art. We hardly get a
glimpse of Winckelmann's transcendental spiritualism in Quatremere de
Quincy, and the frigid academics of Victor Cousin were easily surpassed
by Theodore Jouffroy, though he too failed of isolating the aesthetic
fact. French Romanticism defined literature as "the expression of
society," admired under German influence the grotesque and the
characteristic, declared the independence of art in the formula of "art
for art's sake," but did not succeed in surpassing philosophically the
old doctrine of the "imitation of nature." F. Schlegel and Solger indeed
were largely responsible for the Romantic movement in France--Schlegel
with his belief in the characteristic or _interesting_ as the principle
of modern art, which led him to admire the cruel and the ugly; Solger
with his dialectic arrangement, whereby the finite or terrestrial
element is absorbed and annihilated in the divine and thus becomes the
tragic, or _vice versa_, and the result is the comic. Rosenkranz
published in Koenigsberg an Aesthetic of the Ugly, and the works of
Vischer and Zeising abound in subtleties relating to the Idea and to its
expression in the beautiful and sublime. These writers conceived of the
Idea as the Knight Purebeautiful, constrained to abandon his tranquil
ease through the machinations of the Ugly; the Ugly leads him into all
sorts of disagreeable adventures, from all of which he eventually
emerges victorious. The Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous, and so on, are
his Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena. Another version of their knight's
adventures might be described as his conquest by his enemies, but at the
moment of conquest he transforms and irradiates his conquerors. To such
a mediocre and artificial mythology led the much-elaborated theory of
the Modifications of the Beautiful.

In England, the associationist psychology continued to hold sway, and
showed, with Dugald Stewart's miserable attempt at establishing two
forms of association, its incapacity to rise to the conception of the
imagination. With the poet Coleridge, England also showed the influence
of German thought, and Coleridge elaborated with Wordsworth a more
correct conception of poetry and of its difference from science. But the
most notable contribution in English at that period came from another
poet, P.B. Shelley, whose _Defence of Poetry_ contains profound, though
unsystematic views, as to the distinction between reason and
imagination, prose and poetry, on primitive language, and on the poetic
power of objectification.

In Italy, Francesco de Sanctis gave magnificent expression to the
independence of art. He taught literature in Naples from 1838 to 1848,
in Turin and Zurich from 1850 to 1860, and after 1870 he was a professor
in the University of Naples. His _Storia della letteratura italiana_ is
a classic, and in it and in monographs on individual writers he exposed
his doctrines.

Prompted by a natural love of speculation, he began to examine the old
grammarians and rhetoricians, with a view to systematize them. But very
soon he proceeded to criticize and to surpass their theories. The cold
rules of reason did not find favour with him, and he advised young men
to go direct to the original works.

The philosophy of Hegel began to penetrate Italy, and the study of Vico
was again taken up. De Sanctis translated the _Logic_ of Hegel in
prison, where the Bourbon Government had thrown him for his liberalism.
Benard had begun his translation of the _Aesthetic_ of Hegel, and so
completely in harmony was De Sanctis with the thought of this master,
that he is said to have guessed from a study of the first volume what
the unpublished volumes must contain, and to have lectured upon them to
his pupils. Traces of mystical idealism and of Hegelianism persist even
in his later works, and the distinction, which he always maintained,
between imagination and fancy certainly came to him from Hegel and
Schelling. He held fancy alone to be the true poetic faculty.

De Sanctis absorbed all the juice of Hegel, but rejected the husks of
his pedantry, of his formalism, of his apriority.

Fancy for De Sanctis was not the mystical transcendental apperception of
the German philosophers, but simply the faculty of poetic synthesis and
creation, opposed to the imagination, which reunites details and always
has something mechanical about it. Faith and poetry, he used to say, are
not dead, but transformed. His criticism of Hegel amounted in many
places to the correction of Hegel; and as regards Vico, he is careful to
point out, that when, in dealing with the Homeric poems, Vico talks of
generic types, he is no longer the critic of art, but the historian of
civilization. De Sanctis saw that, _artistically_, Achilles must always
be Achilles, never a force or an abstraction.

Thus De Sanctis succeeded in keeping himself free from the Hegelian
domination, at a moment when Hegel was the acknowledged master of
speculation.

But his criticism extended also to other German aestheticians. By a
curious accident, he found himself at Zurich in the company of Theodore
Vischer, that ponderous Hegelian, who laughed disdainfully at the
mention of poetry, of music, and of the decadent Italian race. De
Sanctis laughed at Vischer's laughter. Wagner appeared to him a
corrupter of music, and "nothing in the world more unaesthetic than the
Aesthetic of Theodore Vischer." His lectures on Ariosto and Petrarch,
before an international public at Zurich, were delivered with the desire
of correcting the errors of these and of other German philosophers and
learned men. He gave his celebrated definitions of French and German
critics. The French critic does not indulge in theories: one feels
warmth of impression and sagacity of observation in his argument. He
never leaves the concrete; he divines the quality of the writer's genius
and the quality of his work, and studies the man, in order to understand
the writer. His great fault is shown in substituting for criticism of
the actual art work a historical criticism of the author and of his
time. For the German, on the other hand, there is nothing so simple that
he does not contrive to distort and to confuse it. He collects shadows
around him, from which shoot vivid rays. He laboriously brings to birth
that morsel of truth which he has within him. He would seize and define
what is most fugitive and impalpable in a work of art. Although nobody
talks so much of life as he does, yet no one so much delights in
decomposing and generalizing it. Having thus destroyed the particular,
he is able to show you as the result of this process, final in
appearance, but in reality preconceived and apriorist, one measurement
for all feet, one garment for all bodies.

About this time he studied Schopenhauer, who was then becoming the
fashion. Schopenhauer said of this criticism of De Sanctis: "That
Italian has absorbed me _in succum et sanguinem_." What weight did he
attach to Schopenhauer's much-vaunted writings on art? Having exposed
the theory of Ideas, he barely refers to the third volume, "which
contains an exaggerated theory of Aesthetic."

In his criticism of Petrarch, De Sanctis finally broke with metaphysical
Aesthetic, saying of Hegel's school that it believed the beautiful to
become art when it surpassed form and revealed the concept or pure idea.
This theory and the subtleties derived from it, far from characterizing
art, represent its contrary: the impotent velleity for art, which cannot
slay abstractions and come in contact with life.

De Sanctis held that outside the domain of art all Is shapeless. The
ugly is of the domain of art, if art give it form. Is there anything
more beautiful than Iago? If he be looked upon merely as a contrast to
Othello, then we are in the position of those who looked upon the stars
as placed where they are to serve as candles for the earth.

Form was for De Sanctis the word which should be inscribed over the
entrance to the Temple of Art. In the work of art are form and content,
but the latter is no longer chaotic: the artist has given to it a new
value, has enriched it with the gift of his own personality. But if the
content has not been assimilated and made his own by the artist, then
the work lacks generative power: it is of no value as art or literature,
though as history or scientific document its value may be great. The
Gods of Homer's _Iliad_ are dead, but the _Iliad_ remains. Guelf and
Ghibelline have disappeared from Italy: not so the _Divine Comedy_,
which is as vigorous to-day as when Dante first took pen in hand. Thus
De Sanctis held firmly to the independence of art, but he did not accept
the formula of "art for art's sake," in so far as it meant separation of
the artist from life, mutilation of the content, art reduced to mere
dexterity.

For De Sanctis, form was identical with imagination, with the artist's
power of expressing or representing his artistic vision. This much must
be admitted by his critics. But he never attained to a clear definition
of art. His theory of Aesthetic always remained a sketch: wonderful
indeed, but not clearly developed and deduced. The reason for this was
De Sanctis' love of the concrete. No sooner had he attained from general
ideas a sufficient clarity of vision for his own purposes, than he
plunged again into the concrete and particular. He did not confine his
activity to literature, but was active also in politics and in the
prosecution and encouragement of historical studies.

As a critic of literature, De Sanctis is far superior to Sainte-Beuve,
Lessing, Macaulay, or Taine. Flaubert's genial intuition adumbrated what
De Sanctis achieved. In one of his letters to Georges Sand, Flaubert
speaks of the lack of an _artistic_ critic. "In Laharpe's time,
criticism was grammatical; in the time of Sainte-Beuve and of Taine, it
is historical. They analyse with great subtlety the historical
environment in which the work appeared and the causes which have
produced it. But the _unconscious_ element In poetry? Whence does It
come? And composition? And style? And the point of view of the author?
Of all that they never speak. For such a critic, great imagination and
great goodness are necessary. I mean an ever-ready faculty of
enthusiasm, and then _taste_, a quality so rare, even among the best,
that it is never mentioned."

De Sanctis alone fulfilled the conditions of Flaubert, and Italy has in
his writings a looking-glass for her literature unequalled by any other
country.

But with De Sanctis, the philosopher of art, the aesthetician, is not so
great as the critic of literature. The one is accessory to the other,
and his use of aesthetic terminology is so inconstant that a lack of
clearness of thought might be found in his work by anyone who had not
studied it with care. But his want of system is more than compensated by
his vitality, by his constant citation of actual works, and by his
intuition of the truth, which never abandoned him. His writings bear the
further charm of suggesting new kingdoms to conquer, new mines of
richness to explore.

While the cry of "Down with Metaphysic" was resounding in Germany, and a
furious reaction had set in against the sort of Walpurgisnacht to which
the later Hegelians had reduced science and history, the pupils of
Herbart came forward and with an insinuating air they seemed to say:
"What is this? Why, it is a rebellion against Metaphysic, the very thing
our master wished for and tried to achieve, half a century ago! But here
we are, his heirs and successors, and we want to be your allies! An
understanding between us will be easy. Our Metaphysic is in agreement
with the atomic theory, our Psychology with mechanicism, our Ethic and
Aesthetic with hedonism." Herbart, who died in 1841, would probably have
disdained and rejected his followers, who thus courted popularity and
cheapened Metaphysic, putting a literal interpretation on his realities,
his ideas and representations, and upon all his most lofty
excogitations.

The protagonist of these neo-Herbartians was Robert Zimmermann. He
constructed his system of Aesthetic out of Herbart, whom he perverted to
his own uses, and even employed the much-abused Hegelian dialectic in
order to introduce modifications of the beautiful into pure beauty. The
beautiful, he said, is a model which possesses greatness, fulness,
order, correction, and definite compensation. Beauty appears to us in a
characteristic form, as a copy of this model.

Vischer, against whom was directed this work of Zimmermann, found it
easy to reply. He ridiculed Zimmermann's meaning of the symbol as the
object around which are clustered beautiful forms. "Does an artist paint
a fox, simply that he may depict an object of animal nature. No, no, my
dear sir, far from it. This fox is a symbol, because the painter here
employs lines and colours, in order to express something different from
lines and colours. 'You think I am a fox,' cries the painted animal.
'You are mightily mistaken; I am, on the contrary, a portmanteau, an
exhibition by the painter of red, white, grey, and yellow tints.'"
Vischer also made fun of Zimmermann's enthusiasm for the aesthetic value
of the sense of touch. "What joy it must be to touch the back of the
bust of Hercules in repose! To stroke the sinuous limbs of the Venus of
Milo or of the Faun of Barberini must give a pleasure to the hand equal
to that of the ear as it listens to the puissant fugues of Bach or to
the suave melodies of Mozart." Vischer defined the formal Aesthetic of
Zimmermann as a queer mixture of mysticism and mathematic.

Lotze, in common with the great majority of thinkers, was dissatisfied
with Zimmermann, but could only oppose his formalism with a variety of
the old mystical Aesthetic. Who, he asked, could believe that the human
form pleases only by its external proportions, regardless of the spirit
within. Art, like beauty, should "enclose the world of values in the
world of forms." This struggle between the Aesthetic of the content and
the Aesthetic of the form attained its greatest height in Germany
between 1860 and 1870, with Zimmermann, Vischer, and Lotze as
protagonists.

These writers were followed by J. Schmidt, who in 1875 ventured to say
that both Lotze and Zimmermann had failed to see that the problem of
Aesthetic concerned, not the beauty or ugliness of the content or of the
form as mathematical relations, but their representation; Koestlin, who
erected an immense artificial structure with the materials of his
predecessors modified; Schasler, who is interesting as having converted
the old Vischer to his thesis of the importance of the Ugly, as
introducing modifications into the beautiful and being the principle of
movement there. Vischer confesses that at one time he had followed the
Hegelian method and believed that in the essence of beauty is born a
disquietude, a fermentation, a struggle: the Idea conquers, hurls the
image into the unlimited, and the Sublime is born; but the image,
offended in its finitude, declares war upon the Idea, and the Comic
appears. Thus the fight is finished and the Beautiful returns to itself,
as the result of these struggles. But now, he says, Schasler has
persuaded him that the Ugly is the leaven which is necessary to all the
special forms of the Beautiful.

E. von Hartmann is in close relation with Schasler. His Aesthetic (1890)
also makes great use of the Ugly. Since he insists upon appearance as a
necessary characteristic of the beautiful, he considers himself
justified in calling his theory concrete idealism. Hartmann considers
himself in opposition to the formalism of Herbart, inasmuch as he
insists upon the idea as an indispensable and determining element of
beauty. Beauty, he says, is truth, but it is not historical truth, nor
scientific nor reflective truth: it is metaphysical and ideal. "Beauty
is the prophet of idealistic truth in an age without faith, hating
Metaphysic, and acknowledging only realistic truth." Aesthetic truth is
without method and without control: it leaps at once from the subjective
appearance to the essence of the ideal. But in compensation for this, it
possesses the fascination of conviction, which immediate intuition alone
possesses. The higher Philosophy rises, the less need has she of passing
through the world of the senses and of science: she approaches ever more
nearly to art. Thus Philosophy starts on the voyage to the ideal, like
Baedeker's traveller, "without too much baggage." In the Beautiful is
immanent logicity, the microcosmic idea, the unconscious. By means of
the unconscious, the process of intellectual intuition takes place in
it. The Beautiful is a mystery, because its root is in the Unconscious.

No philosopher has ever made so great a use of the Ugly as Hartmann. He
divides Beauty into grades, of which the one below is ugly as compared
with that above it. He begins with the mathematical, superior to the
sensibly agreeable, which is unconscious. Thence to formal beauty of the
second order, the dynamically agreeable, to formal beauty of the third
order, the passive teleological; to this degree belong utensils, and
language, which in Hartmann's view is a dead thing, inspired with
seeming life, only at the moment of use. Such things did the philosopher
of the Unconscious dare to print in the country of a Humboldt during the
lifetime of a Steinthal! He proceeds in his list of things beautiful,
with formal beauty of the fourth degree, which is the active or living
teleological, with the fifth, which is that of species. Finally he
reaches concrete beauty, or the individual microcosm, the highest of
all, because the individual idea is superior to the specific, and is
beauty, no longer formal, but of content.

All these degrees of beauty are, as has been said, connected with one
another by means of the ugly, and even in the highest degree, which has
nothing superior to it, the ugly continues its office of beneficent
titillation. The outcome of this ultimate phase is the famous theory of
the Modifications of the Beautiful. None of these modifications can
occur without a struggle, save the sublime and the graceful, which
appear without conflict at the side of supreme beauty. Hartmann gives
four instances: the solution is either immanent, logical,
transcendental, or combined. The idyllic, the melancholy, the sad, the
glad, the elegiac, are instances of the immanent solution; the comic in
all its forms is the logical solution; the tragic is the transcendental
solution; the combined form is found in the humorous, the tragi-comic.
When none of these solutions is possible, we have the ugly; and when an
ugliness of content is expressed by a formal ugliness, we have the
maximum of ugliness, the true aesthetic devil.

Hartmann is the last noteworthy representative of the German
metaphysical school. His works are gigantic in size and appear
formidable. But if one be not afraid of giants and venture to approach
near, one finds nothing but a big Morgante, full of the most commonplace
prejudices, quite easily killed with the bite of a crab!

During this period, Aesthetic had few representatives in other
countries. The famous conference of the Academy of Moral and Political
Sciences, held in Paris in 1857, gave to the world the "Science du Beau"
of Leveque. No one is interested in it now, but it is amusing to note
that Leveque announced himself to be a disciple of Plato, and went on to
attribute eight characteristics to the beautiful. These he discovered by
closely examining the lily! No wonder he was crowned with laurels! He
proved his wonderful theory by instancing a child playing with its
mother, a symphony of Beethoven, and the life of Socrates! One of his
colleagues, who could not resist making fun of his learned friend,
remarked that he would be glad to know what part was played in the life
of a philosopher by the normal vivacity of colour!

Thus German theory made no way in France, and England proved even more
refractory.

J. Ruskin showed a poverty, an incoherence, and a lack of system in
respect to Aesthetic, which puts him almost out of court. His was the
very reverse of the philosophic temperament. His pages of brilliant
prose contain his own dreams and caprices. They are the work of an
artist and should be enjoyed as such, being without any value for
philosophy. His theoretic faculty of the beautiful, which he held to be
distinct alike from the intelligence and from feeling, is connected with
his belief in beauty as a revelation of the divine intentions, "the seal
which God sets upon his works." Thus the natural beauty, which is
perceived by the pure heart, when contemplating some object untouched by
the hand of man, is far superior to the work of the artist. Ruskin was
too little capable of analysis to understand the complicated
psychologico-aesthetic process taking place within him, as he
contemplated some streamlet, or the nest of some small bird.

At Naples flourished between 1861 and 1884 Antonio Tari, who kept
himself in touch with the movement of German thought, and followed the
German idealists in placing Aesthetic in a sort of middle kingdom, a
temperate zone, between the glacial, inhabited by the Esquimaux of
thought, and the torrid, dwelt in by the giants of action. He dethroned
the Beautiful, and put Aesthetic in its place, for the Beautiful is but
the first moment; the later ones are the Comic, the Humorous, and the
Dramatic. His fertile imagination found metaphors and similes in
everything: for instance, he called the goat the Devil, opposed to the
lamb, Jesus. His remarks on men and women are full of quaint fancies. He
granted to women grace, but not beauty, which resides in equilibrium.
This is proved by her falling down so easily when she walks; by her bow
legs, which have to support her wide hips, made for gestation; by her
narrow shoulders, and her opulent breast. She is therefore a creature
altogether devoid of equilibrium!

I wish that it were possible to record more of the sayings of the
excellent Tari, "the last joyous priest of an arbitrary Aesthetic,
source of confusion."

The ground lost to the German school of metaphysicians was occupied
during the second half of the nineteenth century by the evolutionary and
positivist metaphysicians, of whom Herbert Spencer is the most notable
representative. The peculiarity of this school lies in repeating at
second or third hand certain idealist views, deprived of the element of
pure philosophy, given to them by a Schelling or a Hegel, and in
substituting a quantity of minute facts and anecdotes, with a view to
providing the positivist varnish. These theories are dear to vulgar
minds, because they correspond to inveterate religious beliefs, and the
lustre of the varnish explains the good fortune of Spencerian positivism
in our time. Another notable trait of this school is its barbaric
contempt for history, especially for the history of philosophy, and its
consequent lack of all link with the series composed of the secular
efforts of so many thinkers. Without this link, there can be no fruitful
labour and no possibility of progress.

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