Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

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The most noteworthy thought on aesthetic of this period is perhaps to be
found among the aestheticians of special branches of the arts, and since
we know that laws relating only to special branches are not conceivable,
this thought may be considered as bearing upon the general theory of
Aesthetic.

The Bohemian critic E. Hanslick (1854) is perhaps the most important of
these writers. His work _On Musical Beauty_ has been translated into
several languages. His polemic is chiefly directed against R. Wagner and
the pretension of finding in music a determined content of ideas and
feelings. He expresses equal contempt for those sentimentalists who
derive from music merely pathological effects, passionate excitement, or
stimulus for practical activity, in place of enjoying the musical works.
"If a few Phrygian notes sufficed to instil courage into the soldier
facing the enemy, or a Doric melody to assure the fidelity of a wife
whose husband was absent, then the loss of Greek music may cause pain to
generals and to husbands, but aestheticians and composers will have no
reason to deplore it." "If every Requiem, every lamenting Adagio,
possessed the power to make us sad, who would be able to support
existence in such conditions? But if a true musical work look upon us
with the clear and brilliant eyes of beauty, we feel ourselves bound by
its invincible fascination, though its theme be all the sorrows of the
century."

For Hanslick, the only end of music was form, or musical beauty. The
followers of Herbart showed themselves very tender towards this
unexpected and vigorous ally, and Hanslick, not to be behindhand in
politeness, returned their compliments, by referring to Herbart and to
R. Zimmermann, in the later editions of his work, as having "completely
developed the great aesthetic principle of form." Unfortunately Hanslick
meant something altogether different from the Herbartians by his use of
the word form. Symmetry, merely acoustic relations, and the pleasure of
the ear, did not constitute the musically beautiful for him. Mathematics
were in his view useless in the Aesthetic of music. "Sonorous forms are
not empty, but perfectly full; they cannot be compared to simple lines
enclosing a space; they are the spirit, which takes form, making its own
bodily configuration. Music is more of a picture than is an arabesque;
but it is a picture of which the subject is inexpressible in words, nor
is it to be enclosed in a precise concept. In music, there is a meaning
and a connexion, but of a specially musical nature: it is a language
which we speak and understand, but which it is impossible to translate."
Hanslick admits that music, if it do not render the quality of
sentiments, renders their tone or dynamic side; it renders adjectives,
if it fail to render substantives; if not "murmuring tenderness" or
"impetuous courage," at any rate the "murmuring" and the "impetuous."

The essence of his book is contained in the negation that it is possible
to separate form and content in music. "Take any motive you will, and
say where form begins and content ends. Are we to call the sounds
content? Very good, but they have already received form. What are we to
call form? Sounds again? But they are already form filled, that is to
say, possessing a content." These observations testify to an acute
penetration of the nature of art. Hanslick's belief that they were
characteristics peculiar to music, not common to every form of art,
alone prevented him from seeing further.

C. Fiedler, published in German (in 1887) an extremely luminous work on
the origin of artistic activity. He describes eloquently how the passive
spectator seems to himself to grasp all reality, as the shows of life
pass before him; but at the moment that he tries to realize this
artistically, all disappears, and leaves him with the emptiness of his
own thoughts. Yet by concentration alone do we attain to expression; art
is a language that we gradually learn to speak. Artistic activity is
only to be attained by limiting ourselves; it must consist of "forms
precisely determined, tangible, sensibly demonstrable, precisely because
it is spiritual." Art does not imitate nature, for what is nature, but
that vast confusion of perceptions and representations that were
referred to above? Yet in a sense art does imitate nature; it uses
nature to produce values of a kind peculiar to itself. Those values are
true visibility.

Fiedler's views correspond with those of his predecessor, Hanslick, but
are more rigorously and philosophically developed. The sculptor A.
Hildebrand may be mentioned with these, as having drawn attention to the
nature of art as architectonic rather than imitative, with special
application to the art of sculpture.

What we miss with these and with other specialists, is a broad view of
art and language, as one and the same thing, the inheritance of all
humanity, not of a few persons, specially endowed. H. Bergson in his
book on laughter (1900) falls under the same criticism. He develops his
theory of art in a manner analogous to Fiedler, and errs like him in
looking upon it as something different and exceptional in respect to the
language of every moment. He declares that in life the individuality of
things escapes us: we see only as much as suffices for our practical
ends. The influence of language aids this rude simplification: all but
proper names are abstractions. Artists arise from time to time, who
recover the riches hidden beneath the labels of ordinary life.

Amid the ruin of idealist metaphysics, is to be desired a healthy return
to the doctrine of Baumgarten, corrected and enriched with the
discoveries that have been made since his time, especially by
romanticism and psychology. C. Hermann (1876) announced this return, but
his book is a hopeless mixture of empirical precepts and of metaphysical
beliefs regarding Logic and Aesthetic, both of which, he believes, deal
not with the empirical thought and experience of the soul, but with the
pure and absolute.

B. Bosanquet (1892) gives the following definition of the beautiful, as
"that which has a characteristic or individual expressivity for the
sensible perception, or for the imagination, subject to the conditions
of general or abstract expressivity for the same means." The problem as
posed by this writer by the antithesis of the two German schools of form
and content, appears to us insoluble.

Though De Sanctis left no school in Italy, his teaching has been cleared
of the obscurities that had gathered round it during the last ten years;
and the thesis of the true nature of history, and of its nature,
altogether different from natural science, has been also dealt with in
Germany, although its precise relation to the aesthetic problem has not
been made clear. Such labours and such discussions constitute a more
favourable ground for the scientific development of Aesthetic than the
stars of mystical metaphysic or the stables of positivism and of
sensualism.

We have now reached the end of the inquiry into the history of aesthetic
speculation, and we are struck with the smallness of the number of those
who have seen clearly the nature of the problem. No doubt, amid the
crowd of artists, critics, and writers on other subjects, many have
incidentally made very just remarks, and if all these were added to the
few philosophers, they would form a gallant company. But if, as Schiller
truly observed, the rhythm of philosophy consist in a withdrawal from
public opinion, in order to return to it with renewed vigour, it is
evident that this withdrawal is essential, and indeed that in it lies
the whole progress of philosophy.

During our long journey, we have witnessed grave aberrations from the
truth, which were at the same time attempts to reach it; such were the
hedonism of the sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity, of the
sensualists of the eighteenth and second half of the nineteenth
centuries; the moralistic hedonism of Aristophanes and the Stoics, of
the Roman eclectics, of the writers of the Middle Age and of the
Renaissance; the ascetic and logical hedonism of Plato and the Fathers
of the Church; the aesthetic mysticism of Plotinus, reborn to its
greatest triumphs, during the classic period of German thought.

Through the midst of these variously erroneous theories, that traverse
the field of thought in all directions, runs a tiny rivulet of golden
truth. Starting from the subtle empiricism of Aristotle, it flows in the
profound penetration of Vico to the nineteenth century, where it appears
again in the masterly analyses of Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and De
Sanctis.

This brief list shows that the science of Aesthetic is no longer to be
discovered, but it also shows _that it is only at its beginning_.

The birth of a science is like the birth of a human being. In order to
live, a science, like a man, has to withstand a thousand attacks of all
sorts. These appear in the form of errors, which must be extirpated, if
the science is not to perish. And when one set has been weeded, another
crops up; when these have been dealt with, the former errors often
return. Therefore _scientific criticism_ is always necessary. No science
can repose on its laurels, complete, unchallenged. Like a human being,
it must maintain its position by constant efforts, constant victories
over error. The general errors which reveal a negation of the very
concept of art have already been dealt with in the Historical Summary.
The particular errors have been exposed in the Theory. They may be
divided under three heads: (i.) Errors as to the characteristic quality
of the aesthetic fact, or (ii.) as to its specific quality, or (iii.) as
to its generic quality. These are contradictions of the characteristics
of intuition, of theoretic contemplation, and of spiritual activity,
which constitute the aesthetic fact.

The principal bar to a proper understanding of the true nature of
language has been and still is Rhetoric, with the modern form it has
assumed, as style. The rhetorical categories are still mentioned in
treatises and often referred to, as having definite existence among the
parts of speech. Side by side with such phrases goes that of the double
form, or metaphor, which implies that there are two ways of saying the
same thing, the one simple, the other ornate.

Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and many minor personages, have been shown to be
victims of the rhetorical categories, and in our own day we have writers
in Italy and in Germany who devote much attention to them, such as R.
Bonghi and G. Groeber; the latter employs a phraseology which he borrows
from the modern schools of psychology, but this does not alter the true
nature of his argument. De Sanctis gave perhaps the clearest and most
stimulating advice in his lectures on Rhetoric, which he termed
Anti-rhetoric.

But even he failed to systematize his thought, and we may say that the
true critique of Rhetoric can only be made from the point of view of the
aesthetic activity, which is, as we know, _one_, and therefore does not
give rise to divisions, and _cannot express the same content now in one
form, now in another_. Thus only can we drive away the double monster of
naked form deprived of imagination, and of decorated form, which would
represent something more than imagination. The same remarks apply to
artistic and literary styles, and to their various laws or rules. In
modern times they have generally been comprised with rhetoric, and
although now discredited, they cannot be said to have altogether
disappeared.

J.C. Scaliger may be entitled the protagonist of the unities in
comparatively modern times: he it was who "laid the foundations of the
classical Bastille," and supplied tyrants of literature, like Boileau,
with some of their best weapons. Lessing opposed the French rules and
restrictions with German rules and restrictions, giving as his opinion
that Corneille and others had wrongly interpreted Aristotle, whose rules
did not really prevent Shakespeare from being included among correct
writers! Lessing undoubtedly believed in intellectual rules for poetry.
Aristotle was the tyrant, father of tyrants, and we find Corneille
saying "qu'il est aise de s'accommoder avec Aristote," much in the same
way as Tartuffe makes his "accommodements avec le ciel." In the next
century, several additions were made to the admitted styles, as for
instance the "tragedie bourgeoise."

But these battles of the rules with one another are less interesting
than the rebellion against all the rules, which began with Pietro
Aretino in the sixteenth century, who makes mock of them in the
prologues to his comedies. Giordano Bruno took sides against the makers
of rules, saying that the rules came from the poetry, and "therefore
there are as many genuses and species of true rules as there are genuses
and species of true poets." When asked how the true poets are to be
known, he replies, "by repeating their verses, which either cause
delight, or profit, or both." Guarini, too, said that "the world judges
poetry, and its sentence is without appeal."

Strangely enough, it was priest-ridden Spain that all through the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led the van of revolt against the
rules and precepts of the grammarians. While Torquato Tasso remained the
miserable slave of grammarians unworthy to lick the dust from his feet,
Lope de Vega slyly remarked that when he wrote his comedies, he locked
up the givers of precepts with six keys, that they might not reproach
him. J.B. Marino declared that he knew the rules better than all the
pedants in the world; "but the true rule is to know when to break the
rules, in accordance with the manners of the day and the taste of the
age." Among the most acute writers of the end of the seventeenth century
is to be mentioned Gravina, who well understood that a work of art must
be its own criterion, and said so clearly when praising a contemporary
for a work which did not enter any one of the admitted categories.
Unfortunately Gravina did not clearly formulate his views.

France of the eighteenth century produced several writers like Du Bos,
who declared that men will always prefer the poems that move them, to
those composed according to rule. La Motte combated the unities of place
and time, and Batteux showed himself liberal in respect to rules.
Voltaire, although he opposed La Motte and described the three unities
as the three great laws of good sense, was also capable of declaring
that all styles but the tiresome are good, and that the best style is
that which is best used. In England we find Home in his _Elements of
Criticism_ deriding the critics for asserting that there must be a
precise criterion for distinguishing epic poetry from all other forms of
composition. Literary compositions, he held, melt into one another, just
like colours.

The literary movement of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of
the nineteenth centuries attacked rules of all sorts. We will not dwell
upon the many encounters of these periods, nor record the names of those
that conquered gloriously, or their excesses. In France the preface to
the _Cromwell_ of V. Hugo (1827), in Italy the _Lettera semiseria di
Grisostomo_, were clarions of rebellion. The principle first laid down
by A.W. Schlegel, that the form of compositions must be organic and not
mechanic, resulting from the nature of the subject, from its internal
development not from an external stamp, was enunciated in Italy. Art is
always a whole, a synthesis.

But it would be altogether wrong to believe that this empirical defeat
of the styles and rules implied their final defeat in philosophy. Even
writers who were capable of dispensing with prejudice when judging works
of art, once they spoke as philosophers, were apt to reassume their
belief in those categories which, empirically, they had discarded. The
spectacle of these literary or rhetorical categories, raised by German
philosophers to the honours of philosophical deduction, is even more
amusing than that which afforded amusement to Home. The truth is that
they were unable to free their aesthetic systems of intellectualism,
although they proclaimed the empire of the mystic idea. Schelling (1803)
at the beginning, Hartmann (1890) at the end of the century, furnish a
good example of this head and tail.

Schelling, in his Philosophy of Art, declares that, historically
speaking, the first place in the styles of poetry is due to Epic, but,
scientifically speaking, it falls to Lyric. In truth, if poetry be the
representation of the infinite in the finite, then lyric poetry, in
which prevails the finite, must be its first moment. Lyric poetry
corresponds to the first of the ideal series, to reflection, to
knowledge; epic poetry corresponds to the second power, to action. This
philosopher finally proceeds to the unification of epic and lyric
poetry, and from their union he deduces the dramatic form, which is in
his view "the supreme incarnation of the essence and of the _in-se_ of
every art."

With Hartmann, poetry is divided into poetry of declamation and poetry
for reading. The first is subdivided into Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic; the
Epic is divided into plastic epic, proper epic, pictorial epic, and
lyrical epic; Lyric is divided into epical lyric, lyrical lyric, and
dramatic lyric; Dramatic is divided into lyrical dramatic, epical
dramatic, and dramatical dramatic. The second (readable poetry) is
divided into poetry which is chiefly epical, lyrical, and dramatic, with
the tertiary division of moving, comic, tragic, and humoristic; and
poetry which can all be read at once, like a short story, or that
requires several sittings, like a romance.

These brief extracts show of what dialectic pirouettes and sublime
trivialities even philosophers are capable, when they begin to treat
of the Aesthetic of the tragic, comic, and humorous. Such false
distinctions are still taught in the schools of France and Germany, and
we find a French critic like Ferdinand Brunetiere devoting a whole
volume to the evolution of literary styles or classes, which he really
believes to constitute literary history. This prejudice, less frankly
stated, still infests many histories of literature, even in Italy.

We believe that the falsity of these rules of classes should be
scientifically demonstrated. In our Theory of Aesthetic we have shown
how we believe that it should be demonstrated.

The proof of the theory of the limits of the arts has been credited to
Lessing, but his merit should rather be limited to having been the first
to draw attention to the problem. His solution was false, but his
achievement nevertheless great, in having posed the question clearly. No
one before him, in antiquity, in the Middle Age, or in modern times, had
seriously asked: What is the value of the distinctions between the arts?
Which of them comes first? Which second? Leonardo da Vinci had declared
his personal predilection for painting, Michael Angelo for sculpture,
but the question had not been philosophically treated before Lessing.

Lessing's attention was drawn to the problem, through his desire to
disprove the assertions of Spence and of the Comte de Caylus, the former
in respect to the close union between poetry and painting in antiquity,
the latter as believing that a poem was good according to the number of
subjects which it should afford the painter. Lessing argued thus:
Painting manifests itself in space, poetry in time: the mode of
manifestation of painting is through objects which coexist, that of
poetry through objects which are consecutive. The objects which coexist,
or whose parts are coexistent, are called bodies. Bodies, then, owing to
their visibility, are the true objects of painting. Objects which are
consecutive, or whose parts are consecutive, are called, in general,
actions. Actions, then, are the suitable object of poetry. He admitted
that painting might represent an action, but only by means of bodies
which make allusion to it; that poetry can represent bodies, but only by
means of actions. Returning to this theme, he explained the action or
movement in painting as added by our imagination. Lessing was greatly
preoccupied with the naturalness and the unnaturalness of signs, which
is tantamount to saying that he believed each art to be strictly limited
to certain modes of expression, which are only overstepped at the cost
of coherency. In the appendix to his _Laocooen_, he quotes Plutarch as
saying that one should not chop wood with a key, or open the door with
an axe. He who should do so would not only be spoiling both those
utensils, but would also be depriving himself of the utility of both. He
believed that this applied to the arts.

The number of philosophers and writers who have attempted empirical
classifications of the arts is enormous: it ranges in comparatively
recent times from Lessing, by way of Schasler, Solger, and Hartmann, to
Richard Wagner, whose theory of the combination of the arts was first
mooted in the eighteenth century.

Lotze, while reflecting upon the futility of these attempts, himself
adopts a method, which he says is the most "convenient," and thereby
incurs the censure of Schasler. This method is in fact suitable for his
studies in botany and in zoology, but useless for the philosophy of the
spirit. Thus both these thinkers maintained Lessing's wrong principle as
to the constancy, the limits, and the peculiar nature of each art.

Who among aestheticians has criticized this principle? Aristotle had a
glimpse of the truth, when he refused to admit that the distinction
between prose and poetry lay in an external fact, the metre.
Schleiermacher seems to have been the only one who was thoroughly aware
of the difficulty of the problem. In analysis, indeed, he goes so far as
to say that what the arts have in common is not the external fact, which
is an element of diversity; and connecting such an observation as this
with his clear distinction between art and what is called technique, we
might argue that Schleiermacher looked upon the divisions between the
arts as non-existent. But he does not make this logical inference, and
his thought upon the problem continues to be wavering and undecided.
Nebulous, uncertain, and contradictory as is this portion of
Schleiermacher's theory, he has yet the great merit of having doubted
Lessing's theory, and of having asked himself by what right are special
arts held to be distinct in art.

Schleiermacher _absolutely denied the existence of a beautiful in
nature_, and praised Hegel for having sustained this negation. Hegel did
not really deserve this praise, as his negation was rather verbal than
effective; but the importance of this thesis as stated by Schleiermacher
is very great, in so far as he denied the existence of an objective
natural beauty not produced by the spirit of man. This theory of the
beautiful in nature, when taken in a metaphysical sense, does not
constitute an error peculiar to aesthetic science. It forms part of a
fallacious general theory, which can be criticized together with its
metaphysic.

The theory of aesthetic senses, that is, of certain superior senses,
such as sight and hearing, being the only ones for which aesthetic
impressions exist, was debated as early as Plato. The _Hippias major_
contains a discussion upon this theme, which Socrates leads to the
conclusion that there exist beautiful things, which do not reach us
through impressions of eye or ear. But further than this, there exist
things which please the eye, but not the ear, and _vice versa_;
therefore the reason of beauty cannot be visibility or audibility, but
something different from, yet common to both. Perhaps this question has
never been so acutely and so seriously dealt with as in this Platonic
dialogue. Home, Herder, Hegel, Diderot, Rousseau, Berkeley, all dealt
with the problem, but in a more or less arbitrary manner. Herder, for
instance, includes touch with the higher aesthetic senses, but Hegel
removes it, as having immediate contact with matter as such, and with
its immediate sensible qualities.

Schleiermacher, with his wonted penetration, saw that the problem was
not to be solved so easily. He refuted the distinction between clear and
confused senses. He held that the superiority of sight and hearing over
the other senses lay in their free activity, in their capacity of an
activity proceeding from within, and able to create forms and sounds
without receiving external impressions. The eye and the ear are not
merely means of perception, for in that case there could be no visual
and no auditive arts. They are also functions of voluntary movements,
which fill the domain of the senses. Schleiermacher, however, considered
that the difference was rather one of quantity, and that we should allow
to the other senses a minimum of independence.

The sensualists, as we know, maintain that all the senses are aesthetic.
That is the hedonistic hypothesis, which has been dealt with and
disproved in this book. We have shown the embarrassment in which the
hedonists find themselves, when they have dubbed all the senses
"aesthetic," or have been obliged to differentiate in an absurd manner
some of the senses from the others. The only way out of the difficulty
lies in abandoning the attempt to unite orders of facts so diverse as
the representative form of the spirit and the conception of given
physical organs or of a given material of impressions.

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