More courage was displayed by Count Francesco Montani of Pesaro in the polemic roused by Orsi's book against Bouhours; in 1705 he wrote: "I know that there are immutable and eternal rules, founded on such sound good sense and solid reason as will remain unshaken as long as mankind lives. But these rules, whose incorruptibility gives them authority to guide our spirits to the end of time, are rare enough to be counted with the nose, and it seems to me somewhat arbitrary to claim to test and regulate our new works by old laws now wholly abrogated and annulled."[32]
In France the rigorism of Boileau was followed by the rebellion of Du Bos, who unhesitatingly declared that "men will always prefer poetry which moves them to that composed according to rule,"[33] and the like heresies. In 1730, De la Motte made war against the unities of time and place, asserting as the most general, and even superior to that of action, the unity of interest.[34] Batteux tended to make free with the rules; and Voltaire, though he opposed De la Motte and declared the three unities to be the "three great laws of good sense," uttered some bold sentiments in his Essay on Epic Poetry, and it was he who remarked that "tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux," and that the best kind is "celui qui est le mieux traité." Diderot was in certain respects a forerunner of Romanticism, and with him must be mentioned Friedrich Melchior Grimm, who was influenced by him. A breath of liberty was wafted into Italy by Metastasio, Bettinelli, Baretti and Cesarotti: in 1766 Buonafede notes in his Epistola della libertà poetica that when erudite persons "define epic poetry, or comedy, or odes, they ought to frame as many definitions as there are compositions and authors."[35] In Germany the first to rise in rebellion against the rules (opposing Gottsched and his disciples) were the representatives of the Swiss school.[36] In England, after examining the definitions by which critics endeavoured to distinguish epic poetry from other compositions, Home wrote, "It affords no little diversion to watch so many profound critics hunting after that which does not exist. They presuppose—without shadow of proof—that there exists a precise criterion by which to distinguish epic poetry from all other kinds of composition. But literary compositions melt one into another like colours: and if in their stronger shades it is easy to recognize them, they are susceptible of such variety and of so many different forms that it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins."[37]
Literary thought between the late eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, that is to say from" the period of genius" to that of romanticism properly so called, rose in rebellion against separate individual rules and against all rules as such. But to describe the battles fought, and their more important episodes; to recount the names of captains victorious or discomfited, or to deplore the excesses committed by the conquerors, is no part of our present task. Upon the ruins of the strict kinds, the "genres tranchés" beloved by Napoleon[38] (a Romanticist in the art of war, but a Classicist in poetry), flourished the drama, the romance and every other mixed kind: upon the ruins of the three unities, flourished the unity of ensemble. Italy made her protest against rules of style in Berchet's famous Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo (1816); and France made hers somewhat later in Victor Hugo's preface to Cromwell (1827). Henceforth men discussed not the kinds, but Art. What is the unity of ensemble but the demand of art itself, which is always an ensemble, a synthesis? What else is the principle, introduced by August Wilhelm Schlegel and adopted by Manzoni and other Italian romanticists, to the effect that form of component parts must be "organic not mechanical, resulting from the nature of the subject and its interior development ... not from the impress of an external and extraneous stamp"?[39]
But it would be quite wrong to suppose that this victory over the rhetoric of kinds was either the cause or the consequence of a final victory over its philosophical presuppositions. In pure theory, none of the critics above named wholly abandoned the kinds and the rules. Berchet admitted four elementary forms, that is four fundamental kinds, in poetry; lyrical, didactic, epic and dramatic, claiming for the poet only the right of "uniting and fusing together the elementary forms in a thousand fashions."[40] Manzoni's only real quarrel was with those rules "founded on special facts instead of on general principles; on the authority of rhetoricians instead of reason."[41] Even De Sanctis was satisfied with a concept somewhat vague, though true enough at bottom: "the most important rules are not those capable of being applied to every content, but those which draw their force ex visceribus caussæ, from the very heart of the content itself."[42] Even more diverting than the spectacle which had delighted Home, is the sight of German philosophy according the honour of a dialectical deduction to the empirical classification of kinds. We shall give two examples, each representing one extreme end of the chain:
Schelling at the beginning of the century (1803), and Hartmann at the end (1890). One section of Schelling's Philosophy of Art is devoted to "the construction of individual poetic kinds"; in it he remarks that were he to follow the historical order, Epic would come first; whereas in the scientific order the Lyric occupies the first place: indeed, if poetry is the representation of the infinite in the finite, the Lyric, in which difference prevails (the finite, the subject), is its first moment, corresponding with the first power of the ideal series, reflexion, knowledge, consciousness, whereas Epic corresponds with the second power, action.[43] From Epic, which is par excellence the objective kind (as being the identity of subjective and objective), derive the Elegy and the Idyl if subjectivity be placed in the object and objectivity in the poet: if objectivity be placed in the object and subjectivity in the poet, didactic poetry results.[44] To these differentiations of the Epic, Schelling adds the romantic or modern Epic, the poem of chivalry; the novel; and the experiments in an epic of ordinary life such as the Luisa of Voss and the Hermann and Dorothea of Goethe; and, co-ordinate with all the foregoing, the Comedia of Dante, "an epic kind in itself" (eine epische Gattung für sich). Finally, from the union on a higher plane of Lyric with Epic, liberty with necessity, arises the third form, the Drama, the reconciliation of antitheses in a totality, "supreme incarnation of the essence and the in-itself of all art."[45]
In Hartmann's Philosophy of the Beautiful, poetry is divided into spoken poetry and read poetry. The former is subdivided into Epic, Lyric and Dramatic, with further subdivisions of Epic into plastic Epic, or strictly epic Epic, and pictorial or lyrical Epic; of Lyric into epical Lyric, lyrical Lyric and dramatic Lyric; of Dramatic into lyrical Drama, epic Drama and dramatic Drama. Read poetry (Lese poesie) is again subdivided into predominantly epical, lyrical or dramatic form with tertiary partitions of the affecting, the comic, the tragic and humorous; and into poems "to be read at a sitting" (like the short story) or to be taken up again and again (like the novel).[46]
Without these highly philosophical trivialities the divisions of kinds still wander through the books called Institutions of Literature, written by philologists and men of letters, and the ordinary school-books of Italy, France and Germany; and psychologists and philosophers still persist in writing about the Æsthetic of the tragic, of the comic and of the humorous.[47] The objectivity of literary kinds is frankly maintained by Ferdinand Brunetière, who looks on literary history as "the evolution of kinds,"[48] and gives sharply defined form to a superstition which, seldom confessed so truthfully or applied so rigorously, survives to contaminate modern literary history.[49]
[1] Republic, iii. 394; see also E. Müller, Gesch. i. Th. d. Kunst, i. pp. 134-206; ii. pp. 238-239, note.
[2] Poet. ch. 6
[3] Annotazioni, introd.
[4] Cf. for Sanskrit poetry S. Levi, Le Théâtre indien, pp. 11-152.
[5] Cf. Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. I., i. pp. 126-154, 2nd ed.
[6] Introd. to his tr. of the Poetics.
[7] Lintilhac, Un Coup d'état, etc., p. 543.
[8] Hamburg. Dramat. Nos. 81, 101-104.
[9] Op. cit. Nos. 96, 101-104.
[10] G. B. Giraldi Cintio, De' romanzi, delle comedie e delle tragedie, 1554 (ed. Dælli, 1864).
[11] Iacopo Mazzoni, Difesa della commedia di Dante, Cesena, 1587.
[12] G. M. Cecchi, prologue to Romanesca, 1585.
[13] Cf. besides the two Veratti, the Compendio della poesia tragicomica, Venice, 1601.
[14] Proginn. poet., Florence, 1627, iii. p. 130.
[15] Cf. A. Belloni, Il seicento, Milan, 1898, pp. 162-164.
[16] Examens, and Discours du poème dramatique, de la tragédie, des trois unités, etc.
[17] Réflexions sur le comique larmoyant, 1749 (trans. by Lessing, Werke, vol. cit.).
[18] Gellert, De comædia commovente, 1751; Lessing, Abhandlungen von den weinerlichen oder rührenden Lustspiele, 1754 (in Werke, vol. vii.).
[19] Prologue to the Cortigiana, 1534.
[20] Degli eroici furori in Opere italiane, ed. Gentile, ii. pp. 310-311.
[21] Il Veratto (against Jason de Nores), Ferrara, 1588.
[22] Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. pp. 174-175 (1st ed.), i.
[23] Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. p. 468 (2nd ed.).
[24] Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609), ed. Morel Fatio, 11. 40-41, 138-140, 157-158.
[25] Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. p. 459.
[26] Marino, letter to G. Preti, in Lettere, Venice, 1627, p. 127.
[27] Dell' arte rappresentiva meditata e all' improvviso, Naples, 1699; cf. pp. 47, 48, 65.
[28] Trattato dello stile e del dialogo, 1646, preface.
[29] Discorso su l' Endimione (in Opere italiane, ed. cit.), ii. pp. 15-16.
[30] Della tragedia, 1715 (ibid. vol. i.).
[31] Prose e poesie, cit., pref. and passim.
[32] In Orsi, Considerazioni, ed. cit. ii. pp. 8, 9.
[33] Réflexions, cit. sect. 34.
[34] Discours sur la tragédie, 1730.
[35] Opuscoli of Agatopisto Cromaziano, Venice, 1797.
[36] Danzel, Gottsched, p. 206 seqq.
[37] Elements of Criticism, iii. pp. 144-145, note.
[38] See conversation of Napoleon with Goethe, in Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe, ii. p. 441.
[39] Manzoni, Epistol. i. pp. 355-356; cf. Lettera sul romanticismo, ibid. pp. 293-299.
[40] Lettera di Grisostomo, opere, ed. Cusani, p. 227.
[41] Lettera sul romanticismo, ibid. p. 280.
[42] La giovinezza di F. de S. chs. 26-28.
[43] Philos, d. Kunst, pp. 639-645.
[44] Op. cit. pp. 657-659.
[45] Op. cit. p. 687.
[46] Philosophie d. Schönen, ch. 2, § 2.
[47] See, e.g., Volkelt, Ästh. d. Tragischen, Munich, 1897; Lipps, Der Streit über Tragödie, etc.
[48] See his other works, L'évolution des genres dans l'histoire de la littérature, Paris, 1890 seqq., and Manuel de l'hist. de la littér. française, ibid., 1898.
[49] Croce, Per la storia della critica e storiografia letter, pp. 23-25.
III
THE THEORY OF THE LIMITS OF THE ARTS
To Lessing must be ascribed the merit and the sole glory of having discovered that every art has its special character and inviolable limits. But his merit lies not in his own theory, which, in itself, is scarcely tenable,[1] but in having, though by an error, aroused discussion of a highly important æsthetical point till then wholly overlooked. After some slight notice from Du Bos and Batteux, some preparation of the field by Diderot[2] and Mendelssohn,[3] and long disquisitions by Meier and other Wolffians upon natural and conventional symbols,[4] Lessing was the first to raise clearly the question of the value attaching to the distinction between the various arts. Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had enumerated the arts according to denominations of current phraseology, and had composed numbers of technical hand-books distinguishing major and minor arts; but in Aristoxenus or Vitruvius, Marchetto da Padova or Cennino Cennini, Leonardo da Vinci or Leon Battista Alberti, Palladio or Scamozzi, it would be vain to look for the problem proposed by Lessing, for the spirit of these technical treatise-writers is entirely different. Some rudiments of the question may be detected in the comparisons made, and the questions of precedence raised, between poetry and painting or painting and sculpture, to be found now and then in stray paragraphs of their books (Leonardo da Vinci pressed the claims of painting, Michæl Angelo those of sculpture): the theme eventually became a favourite one for academic discussion, and was not despised by Galileo himself.[5]
Lessing was induced to raise the question in the attempt to controvert the strange views of Spence concerning the close union between painting and poetry among the ancients, and of Count Caylus, who held that the excellence of a poem must be judged by the number of subjects it offers to the brush of the painter. He was further instigated by the comparisons between poetry and painting upon which were commonly founded the most ridiculous rules for tragedy: the maxim Ut pictura poësis, whose original motive was to emphasize the representative or imaginative character of poetry, and the community of nature among the arts, had been converted by superficial interpretation into a defence of the most vicious intellectualistic and realistic prejudices. Lessing argued in this wise: "If painting in its imitations employs precisely a medium or symbol different from that of poetry (the former employing spatial forms and colours, the latter temporal articulated sounds), since the symbol must certainly be in close relation with that which is signified, coexistent symbols can only express coexistent objects or parts of objects, and consecutive symbols can only express consecutive objects or parts of objects. Objects mutually coexistent, or having mutually coexistent parts, are called bodies. Bodies, then, through their quality of visibility, are the true objects of painting. Objects successively consecutive amongst themselves, or whose parts are consecutive, are called in general actions. Actions, then, are the suitable objects of poetry." Painting, undoubtedly, may represent action, but only by means of bodies which indicate it; and poetry may represent bodies, but only by indicating them by means of actions. When a poet using language, i.e. arbitrary symbols, sets himself to describe bodies, he is no longer a poet but a prose-writer, since a true poet only describes bodies by the effect they produce on the soul.[6] Retouching and developing this distinction, Lessing described action or movement in a picture as an addition made by the imagination of the beholder; so true is this, says he, that animals perceive nothing save immobility in a picture. He further studied the various unions of arbitrary with natural symbols, such as that of poetry with music (in which the former is subordinate to the latter), of music with dancing, of poetry with dancing, and of music and poetry with dancing (union of arbitrary consecutive audible symbols with natural visible symbols): of the pantomime of antiquity (union of arbitrary consecutive visible symbols with natural consecutive visible symbols): of the language of the dumb (the only art that employs arbitrary consecutive visible symbols): and, lastly, of imperfect unions, such as that of painting with poetry. If not every use to which language is put is poetic, Lessing holds that not every use of natural coexistent signs is pictorial: painting, like language, has its prose. Prosaic painters are those who represent consecutive objects notwithstanding the character of coexistence in their signs, allegorical painters those who make arbitrary use of natural signs, and those who pretend to represent the invisible or the audible by means of the visible. Desirous of preserving the naturalness of symbolism, Lessing ended by condemning the custom of painting objects on a diminished scale, and concludes: "I think that the aim of an art should be that only to which it is specially adapted, not that which can be performed equally well by other arts. I find in Plutarch a comparison which illustrates this admirably: he who would split wood with a key and open the door with an axe not only spoils both utensils but deprives himself of the unity of each alike."[7]
The principle of limitations or of the specific character of individual arts, as laid down by Lessing, occupied the attention of philosophers in later days, who, without discussing the principle itself, employed it in classifying the arts and arranging them in series.
Herder here and there continued Lessing's examination in his fragment on Plastic (1769);[8] Heydenreich wrote a treatise (1790) on the limits of the six arts (music, dance, figurative arts gardening, poetry and representative art), and criticized the clavecin oculaire of Father Castel, a contrivance for the combination of colours which should act in the same way as the series of musical notes in harmony and melody,[9] Kant appealed to the analogy of a speaking man, and classified the arts according to speech, gesture and tone as arts of speech, figurative arts, and arts producing a mere play of sensations (mimicry and colouring).[10]
Schelling differentiated the artistic identity according as it consisted in the infusion of the infinite into the finite, or of the finite into the infinite (ideal art or real art): into poetry and art proper. Under the heading of real arts he included the figurative arts, music, painting, plastic (which comprehended architecture, bas-relief and sculpture): in the ideal series were the three corresponding forms of poetry, lyrical, epical and dramatic.[11]
With a similar method, Solger placed poetry, the universal art, side by side with art strictly so called, which is either symbolical (sculpture) or allegorical (painting), and, in either case, is a union of concepts and bodies: if you take corporality without concept, you have architecture; if concept without matter, music.[12] Hegel makes poetry the bond of union between the two extremes of figurative art and of music.[13]
We have already seen how Schopenhauer destroyed the accepted limitations of art and built them up again, following the order of the ideas which they represent.[14] Herbart clung to Lessing's two groups, simultaneous arts and successive arts, and defined the former as "permitting themselves to be inspected from every side," the latter as "rejecting complete investigation and remaining in semi-darkness": in the first group he placed architecture, plastic, church music and classical poetry; in the second ornamental gardening, painting, secular music and romantic poetry.[15]
Herbart was implacable against those who look in one art for the perfections of another; who "look on music as a sort of painting, painting as poetry, poetry as an elevated plastic and plastic as a species of æsthetic philosophy,"[16] while admitting that a concrete work of art, such as a picture, may contain elements of the picturesque, the poetic and other kinds, held together by the skill of the artist.[17]
Weisse divided the arts into three triads, intended to recall the nine Muses.[18] Zeising invented-a cross-division into figurative arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), musical arts (instrumental music, song, poetry), and arts of mimicry (dance, musical mimicry, representative art), and into macrocosmic arts (architecture, instrumental music, dance), microcosmic arts (sculpture, song, musical mimicry) and historical arts (painting, poetry and representative art).[19]
Vischer classified them according to the three forms of imagination (figurative, sensuous and poetic), into objective arts (architecture, plastic and painting), a subjective art (music) and an objective-subjective art[20] (poetry). Gerber proposed to recognize a special "art of language" (Sprachkunst), distinguishable alike from prose and poetry and consisting in the expression of simple movements of the soul. Such an art would correspond with plastic in the following scheme: arts of the eye—(a) architecture, (b) plastic, (c) painting; arts of the ear—(a) prose, (b) the art of language, (c) poetry.[21]
The two most recent systems of classification are furnished by Schasler and Hartmann, who have also submitted the schemes of their predecessors to searching criticism. Schasler[22] arranges the arts in two groups, adopting the criterion of simultaneity and succession: the arts of simultaneity are architecture, plastic and painting; of succession, music, mimicry and poetry. He says that by following the series in the order indicated, it will be seen that simultaneity, originally predominant, yields place to succession, which predominates in the second group and subordinates without wholly displacing the other. Parallel with this, another division is evolved, deduced from the relation between the ideal and material elements in each separate art, between movement and repose; which begins with architecture "materially the heaviest, spiritually the lightest of all the arts," and ends with poetry, in which the opposite relation is observed. Curious analogies are established by this method between the first and second group of arts: between architecture and music; between plastic and mimicry; between painting in its three forms of landscape, genre and historical, and poetry in its three forms of lyric (declamatory), epic (rhapsodic) and drama (representative).
Hartmann[23] divides the arts into arts of perception and arts of imagination: the former tripartite into spatial or visual (plastic and painting), temporal or auditory (instrumental music, linguistic mimicry, expressive song) and temporal-spatial or mimic (pantomime, mimic dances, art of the actor, art of the opera-singer); the second contains but one single species, which is poetry. Architecture, decoration, gardening, cosmetic and prosewriting are excluded from this system of classification and lumped together as non-free arts.
Parallel with this search for a classification of the arts, the same philosophers were led into the quest of the supreme art. Some favoured poetry, others music or sculpture; others again claimed the supremacy for combined arts, especially for Opera, according to the theory of it already advanced in the eighteenth century[24] and maintained and developed in our day by Richard Wagner.[25] One of the latest philosophers to raise the question "whether single arts, or arts in combination, had the greater value," concluded that single arts as such possess their own perfection, yet the perfection of united arts is still greater, notwithstanding the compromises and mutual concessions enforced upon them by their union; that single arts, from another point of view, have the greater value; and lastly, that both single and combined arts are necessary to the realisation of the concept of art.[26]
The capriciousness, emptiness and childishness of such problems and their solutions must have excited feelings of impatience and disgust, but we rarely find a doubt thrown on their validity. One such dissentient is Lotze when he writes: "It is difficult to see the use of such attempts. Knowledge of the nature and laws of individual arts is but little increased by indication of the systematic place allotted to each." He further observed that in real life the arts are variously conjoined, forming themselves into no systematic series, while in the world of thought an immense variety of orders can be created; he therefore selected one of these possible orders, not because it was the sole legitimate one, but because it was convenient (bequem). His series begins with music, "the art of free beauty, determined only by the laws of its matter, not by conditions imposed by a given task of purpose or of imitation"; followed by architecture, "which no longer plays freely with forms, but subjects them to the service of an end"; and then by sculpture, painting and poetry, excluding minor arts which cannot be co-ordinated with the others, since they are incapable of expressing with any approach to completeness the totality of the spiritual life.[27] A recent French critic, Basch, opens his treatise with the following excellent remarks: "Is it necessary to show there is no such thing as an absolute art, differentiating itself later by means of one knows not what immanent laws? What exists is the particular forms of art, or rather artists who have striven to translate, as best they can, according to the material means at their command, the song of the ideal in their souls." But later on he thinks it possible to effect a division of the arts by starting "from the artist, instead of the art in itself," by proceeding "according to the three great types of fancy, visual, motor and auditory"; and as for the debated point of the supreme art, he thinks it must be settled in favour of music.[28]
Schasler is not altogether wrong in his spirited counterattack on Lotze's criticism; he protests against the principle of indifference and convenience, and remarks that "the classification of the arts must be regarded as the real touchstone, the real differential test of the scientific value of an æsthetic system; for on this point all theoretical questions are concentrated and crowd together to find a concrete solution."[29]
The principle of convenience may be excellent as applied to the approximative grouping of botanical or zoological classifications, but it has no place in philosophy; and as Lotze, in common with Schasler and other æstheticians, conformed to Lessing's principle of the constancy, limits and peculiar nature of each art, and therefore held that the concepts of the individual arts were speculative and not empirical concepts, he could not evade the duty of fixing the mutual relations of these concepts, arranging them in series, subordinating and co-ordinating them, and arriving at each of them either deductively or dialectically. He ought, in order to get definitely rid of these barren attempts at classification and at discovering the supreme art, to have criticized and dissolved Lessing's principle itself: to keep the principle and deny the need for a classification, as Lotze did, was obviously inconsistent. But not a single æsthetician has ever re-examined or investigated the scientific foundation of the distinctions enunciated by Lessing in his fluent and elegant prose; no one has probed to the bottom the truth which was illumined by Aristotle in a single lightning-flash, when he refused to allow an extrinsic difference, that of metre, as the real distinction between prose and poetry:[30] no one, that is to say, save perhaps Schleiermacher, who at least called attention to the difficulties of the current doctrine.