Æsthetic as science of expression and general linguistic

He proposed to start from the general concept of art and prove by deduction the necessity of all its forms; and after finding two sides to artistic activity, the objective consciousness (gegenständliche) and the immediate consciousness (unmittelbare), and observing that art stands wholly neither in the one nor in the other and that the immediate consciousness or representation (Vorstellung) gives rise to mimicry and music, while the objective consciousness or image (Bild) gives rise to the figurative arts, he then, proceeding to analyse a painting, found the two forms of consciousness to be in this case inseparable, and remarks: "Here we arrive at the precise opposite: searching for distinction, we find unity." Nor did the traditional division of the arts into simultaneous and successive seem to him very solid, for "when looked at attentively, it evaporates entirely"; in architecture or gardening, contemplation is successive, while in the arts labelled as successive, such as poetry, the chief thing is coexistence and grouping: "from whichever side we look at it, the difference is but secondary and the antithesis between the two orders of art merely means that every contemplation, like every act of production, is always successive, but, in thinking out the relation of the two sides in a work of art, both seem indispensable: coexistence (Zugleichsein) and successive existence (das Successivsein)." In another passage he observes: "The reality of art as external appearance is conditioned by the mode, depending on our physical and corporeal organism, in which the internal is externalised: movements, forms, words.... That which is common to all arts is not the external, which is rather the element of diversification." When these observations are compared with the sharp distinction he himself drew between art and technique, it would be easy to deduce that he held the partitions of the arts and the concepts of the particular arts to be devoid of æsthetic value. But Schleiermacher does not draw this logical inference, he wavers and hesitates: he recognizes the inseparability of the subjective and objective, musical and figurative, elements in poetry, yet he struggles to discover the definitions and limits of the individual arts; sometimes he dreams of a union of the various arts from which a complete art would spring; and when composing the syllabus of his lectures on Æsthetic, he arranged the arts into arts of accompaniment (mimicry and music), figurative arts (architecture, gardening, painting, sculpture) and poetry.[31] Nebulous, vague, contradictory as this may be, Schleiermacher had the acumen to distrust the soundness of Lessing's theory and to inquire by what right particular arts are singled out from art in general.

IV

OTHER PARTICULAR DOCTRINES

I. Schleiermacher also rejected the concept of Natural Beauty, giving Hegel greater praise than he deserved in the matter, because Hegel's denial of this concept was, as we have seen, more verbal than real. At all events, Schleiermacher's radical denial of the existence of a natural beauty external to and independent of the human mind marked a victory over a serious error, and appears to us imperfect and one-sided only so far as it seems to exclude those æsthetic facts of imagination which are attached to objects given in nature.[1] Important contributions towards the correction of this imperfect and one-sided element were supplied by the historical and psychological study of the "feeling for nature," promoted successfully by Alexander Humboldt in his dissertation to be found in the second volume of Cosmos,[2] and continued by Laprade, Biese, and others in our own time.[3] In his criticism of his own Ästhetik, Vischer completes the passage from the metaphysical construction of beauty in nature to the psychological interpretation of it, and recognizes the necessity of suppressing the section devoted to Natural Beauty in his first æsthetic system, and incorporating it with the doctrine of imagination: he says that such treatments do not belong to æsthetic science, being a medley of zoology, sentiment, fantasy and humour, worthy of development in monographs in the style of the poet G. G. Fischer's on the life of birds, or Bratranek's on the æsthetic of the vegetable world.[4] Hartmann, as heir of the old metaphysics, reproaches Vischer for this exclusion, and maintains that, in addition to the beauty of imagination introduced by man into natural things (hineingelegte Schönheit), there exist a formal and a substantial beauty in nature, coinciding with realisation of the immanent ends or ideas of nature.[5] But the way chosen ultimately by Vischer is the only one by which Schleiermacher's thesis can be successfully developed so as to show the precise meaning which may be given to the assertion of (æsthetic) beauty in nature.

II. That æsthetic senses or superior senses exist and that beauty attaches to certain senses only, not to all, is a very old opinion. We have seen already[6] that Socrates, in the Hippias maior, mentions the doctrine of beauty as "that which pleases hearing and sight" (τὸ καlὸν eστὶ τὸ δι' ἀκοῆs τε καὶ ὃψεως ήδύ): and he adds, it seems impossible to deny that we take pleasure in looking at handsome men and fine ornaments, pictures and statues with our eyes, and hearing beautiful songs or beautiful voices, music, speeches and conversations with our ears. Nevertheless Socrates himself in the same dialogue confutes this theory by perfectly valid arguments, amongst which is that, besides the difficulty arising from the fact that beautiful things may be found outside the range of the sensible impressions of eye and ear, there is no reason for creating a special class for the pleasure arising from impressions on these two senses, to the exclusion of others. He also states the more subtle and philosophical objection that that which is pleasing to the sight is not so to the hearing, and vice versa; whence it follows that the ground of beauty must not be sought in visibility or audibility, but in something differing from either and common to both.[7]

The problem was never again, perhaps, attacked with such acumen and seriousness as in this ancient dialogue. In the eighteenth century Home remarked that beauty depended on sight, and that impressions received by the other senses might be agreeable but were not beautiful, and distinguished sight and hearing as superior to those of touch, taste and smell, the latter being merely bodily in nature and without the spiritual refinement of the other two. He held these to produce pleasures superior to organic pleasures though inferior to intellectual; decorous pleasures, that is to say; elevated, sweet, moderately exhilarating; as far removed from the turbulence of the passions as from the languor of indolence, and intended to refresh and soothe the spirit.[8] Following suggestions of Diderot, Rousseau and Berkeley, Herder drew attention to the importance of the sense of touch (Gefühl) in plastic art: of this "third sense, which perhaps deserves to be investigated first of all, and is unjustly relegated to a place amongst the grosser senses." Certainly "touch knows nothing of surface or colour," but "sight, for its part, knows nothing of forms and configurations." Thus "touch cannot be so gross a sense as it is reputed, if it is the very organ by which we sensate all other bodies, and rules over a vast kingdom of subtle and complex concepts. As the surface stands to the body, so does sight stand in respect of touch, and it is merely a colloquial abbreviation to speak of seeing bodies as surfaces and to suppose that we see with our eyes that which we have gradually learnt in infancy simply by the sense of touch." Every beauty of form or corporeity is a concept not visible, but palpable.[9] From the triad of æsthetic senses thus established by Herder (sight for painting; hearing for music; touch for sculpture), Hegel returned to the customary dyad, saying that "the sensory part of art has reference only to the two theoretic senses of sight and hearing"; that smell, taste and touch must be excluded from artistic pleasures, since they are connected with matter as such and the immediate sensible quality it may possess (smell with material volatilization; taste with material solution of objects; and touch with hot, cold, smooth and so forth); and that hence they can claim no concern with the objects of art, which are obliged to keep themselves in real independence, rejecting all relation with the merely sensory. That which pleases these senses is not the beautiful of art.[10]

It was Schleiermacher once more who recognized the impossibility of disposing of the matter in this summary fashion. He refused to admit the distinction between confused senses and clear senses, and asserted that the superiority of sight and hearing over the other senses lay in the fact that the others "are not capable of any free activity, and indeed represent the maximum of passivity, whereas sight and hearing are capable of an activity proceeding from within, and are able to produce forms and notes without having received impressions from outside"; were eye and ear merely means of perception, there would be no visual or auditory arts, but they also operate as a function of voluntary movements which supply a content to the dominion of the senses. From another standpoint, however, Schleiermacher thinks that "the difference seems to be one rather of degree or quantity, and a minimum of independence must be recognized as existing in the other senses as well."[11] Vischer remains faithful to the traditional "two æsthetic senses," "free organs and no less spiritual than sensuous," which "have no reference to the material composition of the object," but allow this "to subsist as a whole and work upon them."[12] Köstlin was of opinion that the inferior senses offer "nothing intuitible separate from themselves, and are only modifications of ourselves, but taste, smell and touch are not devoid of all æsthetic importance, since they assist the superior senses; without touch an image could not be recognized by the eye as being hard, resistant or rough; without smell certain images could not be represented as sweet or scented."[13]

We cannot go into a detailed account of all doctrines connected with sensationalistic principles,[14] for all the senses are naturally accepted as æsthetic by the sensationalists, who use "æsthetic" interchangeably with" hedonistic": it will suffice if we recall the "learned" Kralik, who was ridiculed by Tolstoy for his theory of the five arts of taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight.[15] The few quotations already given show the embarrassing difficulty caused by the use of the word "æsthetic" as a qualification of "sense," compelling writers to invent absurd distinctions between various groups of senses, or to recognize all senses as being æsthetic, thus giving æsthetic value to every sensory impression, as such. No way out of this labyrinth can be found save by asserting the impossibility of effecting a union between such wholly disparate orders of ideas as the concept of the representative form of the spirit and that of particular physiological organs or a particular matter of sense-impressions.[16]

III. A variety of the error of literary kinds is to be found in the theory of modes, forms or kinds of style (χαρακτῆρες τῆς φράσεως), considered by the ancients as consisting of three forms, the sublime, the medium and the tenuous, a tripartition due, it would seem, to Antisthenes,[17] modified later into subtile, robustum and floridum, or amplified into a fourfold division, or designated by adjectives of historic origin as in the Attic, Asiatic or Rhodian styles. The Middle Ages preserved the tradition of a tripartite division, sometimes giving it a curious interpretation, to the effect that the sublime style treats of kings, princes and barons (e.g. the Aeneid); the mediocre, of middle-class people (e.g. Georgies); the humble, of the lowest class (e.g. Bucolics;) and the three styles were for this reason also called tragic, elegiac and comic.[18] It is a well-known fact that kinds in style have never ceased to afford matter for discussion in rhetorical text-books down to modern times; for instance, we find Blair distinguishing styles by such epithets as the diffuse, the concise, the nervous, the daring, the soft, the elegant, the flowery, etc. In 1818 the Italian Melchiorre Delfico, in his book on The Beautiful, energetically criticized the "endless division of styles," or the superstition "that there could be so many kinds of style"; saying that "style is either good or bad," and adding that it is not possible "it should exist as a preconceived idea in the artist's mind," but that "it should be the consequence of the principal idea, i.e. that conception which determines the invention and the composition."[19]

IV. The same error reappears in the philosophy of language, as the theory of grammatical forms or parts of speech,[20] first created by the sophists (Protagoras is credited with having first distinguished the gender of nouns), adopted by the philosophers, notably by Aristotle and the Stoics (the former was acquainted with two or three parts of speech, the latter with four or five), developed and elaborated by the Alexandrian grammarians in the famous and endless controversy between the analogists and the anomalists. The analogists (Aristarchus) aimed at introducing logical order and regularity into linguistic facts, and described as deviations all such as seemed to them irreducible to logical form. These they called pleonasm, ellipsis, enallage, parallage, and metalepsis. The violence thus wrought by the analogists upon spoken and written language was such that (as Quintilian tells us) some one wittily (non invenuste) remarked that it appeared to be one thing to talk Latin and quite another to talk grammar (aliud esse latine, aliud grammatice loqui).[21] The anomalists must be credited with restoring to language its free imaginative movement: the Stoic Chrysippus composed a treatise to prove that one thing (one same concept) may be expressed by different sounds, and one and the same sound may express different concepts (similes res dissimilibus verbis et similibus dissimiles esse vocabulis notatas.) Another anomalist was the celebrated grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus, who rejected the metalepsis, the schemes, and the other artifices by which the analogists tried to explain facts which did not fit their categories, and pointed out that the use of one word for another, or one part of speech for another, is not a grammatical figure, but a blunder, a thing hardly to be attributed to a poet such as Homer. The upshot of the dispute between anomalists and analogists was the science of Grammar (τεχνη γραμματική), as handed down by the ancients to the modern world, which is justly considered as a sort of compromise between the two opposed parties because, if the schemes of inflection (κανόνες) satisfy the demands of the analogists, their variety satisfies those of the anomalists; hence the original definition of Grammar as theory of analogy was changed subsequently to "theory of analogy and anomaly" (ὁμοίον τε καὶ ἀνoμoίου θεωρία). The concept of correct usage, with which Varro hoped to settle the controversy, fell into the trap (common to compromises), merely stating the contradiction in set terms, like the "convenient ornament" of Rhetoric or the kinds accorded a "certain licence" in the literature of precept. If language follows usage (that is to say, the imagination), it does not follow reason (or logic); if it follows reason, it does not follow usage. When the analogists upheld logic as supreme at least inside the individual kinds and sub-kinds, the anomalists hastened to show that even this was not the case. Varro himself was forced to confess that "this part of the subject really is very difficult" (hic locus maxime lubricus est).[22]

In the Middle Ages grammar was cultivated to the point of superstition. Divine inspiration was found lurking in the eight parts of speech because "octavus numerus frequenter in divinis scripturis sacratis invenitur," and in the three persons of verbal conjugation, created simply "ut quod in Trinitatis fide credimus, in eloquiis inesse videatur."[23] Grammarians of the Renaissance and later recommenced the study of linguistic problems and worked to death ellipsis, pleonasm, licence, anomaly and exception; only in comparatively recent times has Linguistic begun to question the very validity of the concept of parts of speech (Pott, Paul and others).[24] If they still survive, the reason may lie in the facts that empirical, practical grammar cannot do without them; that their venerable antiquity disguises their illegitimate and shady origin; and that energetic opposition has been worn down by the fatigue of an endless war.

V. The relativity of taste is a sensationalistic theory which denies a spiritual value to art. But it is rarely maintained by writers in the ingenuous categorical garb of the old adage: De gustibus non est disputandum (concerning which it would be useful to enquire when the saying was born, and what it fust meant: whether, too, the word gustibus referred solely to impressions of the palate, and was only later extended to include æsthetic impressions); as though sensationalists, as if dimly conscious of the higher nature of art, have never been able to resign themselves to the complete relativity of taste. Their torments in the matter really move one to pity. "Is there," Batteux asks, "such a thing as good taste, and is it the only good taste? In what does it consist? Upon what depend? Does it depend upon the object itself or the genius at work upon it? Are there, or are there not, rules? Is wit alone, or heart alone, the organ of taste, or both together? How many questions have been raised on this familiar often-treated subject, how many obscure and involved answers have been given!"[25] This perplexity is shared by Home. Tastes, he says, must not be disputed; neither those of the palate nor those of other senses. A remark which seems highly reasonable from one point of view; but, from another, somewhat exaggerated. But yet how can one dispute it? how can one maintain that what actually pleases a man ought not to please him? The proposition then must be true. But now no man of taste will assent to it. We speak of good taste and bad taste; are all criticisms which turn upon this distinction to be considered absurd? have these everyday expressions no meaning? Home ends by asserting a common standard of taste, deduced from the necessity of a common life for mankind or, as he says, from a "final cause"; for without uniformity of taste, who would trouble to produce works of art, build elegant and costly edifices, or lay out beautiful gardens and so forth? He does not fail to draw attention to a second final cause; that of the advisability of attracting citizens to public shows and uniting those whom class-differences and diversity of occupation tend to keep apart. But how shall a standard of taste be established? This is a new perplexity, which one cannot think to be escaped by observing that, as in framing moral rules we seek the counsel of the most honourable of educated men, not of savages; so to determine the standard of taste we should have recourse to the few who are not worn out by degrading bodily labour, not corrupted in taste, and not rendered effeminate by pleasure, who have received the gift of good taste from nature, and have brought it to perfection by the education and practice of a lifetime: if, notwithstanding, controversies arise, then reference must be made to the principles of Criticism as set forth by Home himself in his own book.[26] Similar contradictions and vicious circles reappear in David Hume's Essay on Taste, where Hume tries in vain to define the distinctive characteristics of the man of taste whose judgement must be law, and, while asserting the uniformity of the general principles of taste as founded in human nature, and warning the reader against giving undue weight to individual perversions and ignorances, at the same time asserts that divergences in taste may be irreconcilable, insuperable, and yet blameless.[27]

But a criticism of æsthetic relativism cannot be based upon the opposite doctrine which, by its affirmation of absoluteness, resolves taste into concepts and logical inferences. The eighteenth century offers examples of this mistake in Muratori, one of the first to maintain the existence of a rule of taste and a universal beauty whose rules are furnished by Poetics;[28] in André, who said that "the beauty in a work of art is not that which pleases at the first glance of fancy through certain individual dispositions of the mental faculties or bodily organs, but that which has a right to please the reason and reflexion by its own inherent excellence or rightness and, if the expression be allowed, by its intrinsic agreeableness";[29] in Voltaire, who recognized a "universal taste" which was "intellectual";[30] and in very many others. This intellectualistic error, no less than the sensationalistic, was attacked by Kant; but even Kant, by making beauty consist in a symbolism of morality, failed to grasp the concept of an imaginative absoluteness of taste.[31] Succeeding generations of philosophers met the difficulty by passing it over in silence.

Nevertheless, this criterion of an imaginative absoluteness, the idea that in order to judge works of art one must place oneself at the artist's point of view at the moment of production, and that to judge is to reproduce, gathered weight little by little from the beginning of the eighteenth century, when its first appearance is seen in the work of the Italian Francesco Montani already quoted (1705), and by the English poet Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism. ("A perfect judge will read each work of wit With the same spirit that its author writ."[32]) A few years later Antonio Conti recognized part of the truth in the règle du premier aspect advised by Terrasson as a test for judging poetry, while noting it to be more applicable to modern than to ancient works: "quand on n'a pas l'esprit prévenu, et que d'ailleurs on l'a assez pénétrant, on peut voir tout d'un coup si un poète a bien imité son objet; car, comme on connaît l'original, c'est-à-dire les hommes et les mœurs de son siècle, on peut aisément lui confronter la copie, c'est-à-dire la poésie qui les imite." In judging ancient writers something more is necessary: "cette règle du premier aspect n'est presque d'aucun usage dans l'examen de l'ancienne poésie, dont on ne peut pas juger qu'après avoir longtemps réfléchi sur la religion des anciens, sur leurs lois, leur mœurs, sur leurs manières de combattre et d'haranguer, etc. Les beautés d'un poème, indépendantes de toutes ces circonstances individuelles, sont très rares, et les grands peintres les ont toujours évitées avec soin, car ils voulaient peindre la nature et non pas leurs idées;"[33] the necessary criterion, therefore, is to be found in history. The end of the same century saw the concept of congenial reproduction sufficiently defined by Heydenreich: "A philosophical critic of art must himself be possessed of genius for art; reason exacts this qualification and grants no dispensation, just as she will refuse to appoint a blind man as judge of colours. The critic must not pretend to be able to feel the attraction of beauty by means of syllogisms (Vernunftschlüsse); beauty must manifest itself to feeling with irresistible self-evidence and, attracted by its fascination, reason must find no time to linger over the why and wherefore; the effect, with its delightful and unexpected possession and domination of the whole being, should suffocate at birth any inquiry into origins or causes. But this state of fanatical admiration cannot last long; reason must inevitably recover consciousness of itself and direct its attention upon the state in which it was during the enjoyment of beauty and upon its present memories of that state...."[34] This was the wholesomely impressionistic theory which prevailed among the Romanticists and was accepted even by De Sanctis.[35] Still there was even then no definite theory of criticism, which demanded as its condition of existence a precise concept of art and of the relations of the work of art with its historical antecedents.[36] The very possibility of æsthetic criticism was questioned in the second half of the nineteenth century, when taste was relegated to a place amongst the facts of individual caprice, and a so-called historical criticism was proclaimed the sole scientific criticism and expounded in works of irrelevant learning or buried beneath the preconceptions of positivists and materialists. Those who reacted against such extremalism and materialism generally made the mistake of supporting themselves by a kind of intellectualistic dogmatism[37] or an empty æstheticism.[38]

VI. We have seen that in the seventeenth century, when the words "taste" and "genius" or "wit" were in fashion, the facts they designated were sometimes interchanged amongst themselves and came to be considered as one single fact, while sometimes each was conceived as distinct in itself, genius being the faculty of production, and taste the faculty of judgement, taste being further subdivided into the sterile and the fertile: a terminology adopted by Muratori[39] in Italy and Ulrich König[40] in Germany. Batteux said, "le goût juge des productions du génie"[41]; and Kant speaks of defective works having genius without taste or taste without genius, and of others in which taste alone suffices;[42] now we find him distinguishing the two concepts as the judging and producing faculties, now he speaks of them as a single faculty existing in various degrees. An inherent difference between taste and genius was accepted by later writers on Æsthetic and assumed its most rigid form in the hands of Herbart and his followers.

VII. The evolutionary theory of art made its appearance towards the end of the eighteenth century. This was the time when the distinction between classical and romantic art was first made; a classification later augmented by an introductory section on Oriental art, owing to the increase of knowledge concerning the pre-Hellenic world. Towards the end of his life Goethe told his friend Eckermann that the concepts of classical and romantic had been formed by himself and Schiller, for he himself had upheld the objective method in poetry, whilst Schiller, in order to champion the subjective form to which he inclined, had written the essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, in which the word naïve (naiv) expresses the style later called classical and the word sentimental (sentimentalisch) that later called romantic. "The Schlegels," continues Goethe, "seized upon these ideas and disseminated them, so that to-day everyone uses them and speaks of classical and romantic, things perfectly unknown fifty years ago"[43] (Goethe was speaking in 1831). Schiller's essay bears the imprint of Rousseau's influence and is dated 1795-6.[44] It contains such statements as this: "Poets are above all things the preservers of nature; and when they cannot be so entirely, and have tried upon themselves the destructive force of arbitrary and artificial forms or have fought against such forms, they stand up to bear witness on her behalf. Poets, therefore, either are nature or, having lost her, seek her. Hence arise two wholly distinct kinds of poetic composition, exhausting between them the whole field of poetry; all poets who are worthy of the name must belong, according to the times and conditions in which they flourish, either to the category of naïve or to that of sentimental poets." Schiller recognized three kinds of sentimental poetry: satirical, elegiac and idyllic; he defined a satirical poet as one "who takes as his object the desertion of nature and the contrast of the real with the ideal." The weak point of this division is the concept of two distinct kinds of poetry, the reduction of the infinite forms in which poetry appears to individuals, to two kinds. If one of these two kinds be taken the perfect and the other as the imperfect kind, the mistake is made of converting imperfection into a kind or species, the negative into a positive. Wilhelm von Humboldt pointed out to his friend that if form is the essence of art, there cannot be a kind of poetry, such as the sentimental or romantic is supposed to be, in which matter preponderates over form, for that would constitute a pseudo-art, not a separate kind of art.[45] Schiller attached no historical meaning to his classification, in fact he declared explicitly that in using the words "ancient" and "modern" as equivalent to "ingenuous" and "sentimental" he did not mean to deny that some "ancient" poets, in his sense of the word, could be found among contemporary writers; the two characters might even be united in the same poet or the same poetical work, as (to give Schiller's own example) in Werther[46] The first to assign a historical meaning to the division were Friedrich and Wilhelm von Schlegel; the former in an early work of 1795, the latter in his celebrated lectures on literary history given at Berlin in 1801-4. But the two senses, systematic and historical, were variously alternated and mixed by literary men and critics, and other distinctions were added; "classical" was sometimes used to describe poetry of a frigid and imitative style, while "romantic" poetry was the inspired; in some countries the word "romantic" came to mean a political reactionary, in Italy it stood for "liberal"; and so forth. In 1815, when Friedrich Schlegel spoke of ancient Persian romantic poems, or when in our times attention is called to the romanticism of the Greek, Latin or French classics, the historical signification is lost in the theoretical, the sense originally intended by Schiller.

But the historical sense was prevalent in German idealism, which inclined towards the construction of a universal history, including that of literature and art, upon a scheme of ideal evolution. Schelling made a sharp division between pagan and Christian art; the second being held an advance upon the former which was the lowest step.[47] Hegel accepted this division and introduced a final regress by dividing the history of art into three periods: symbolic (Oriental) art, classical (Hellenic) and romantic (modern). Just as he conceived Roman art (with its introduction of satire and other kinds indicative of a failure to maintain harmony between form and content) as the dissolution of classical art, a thought suggested by Schiller, so he found in the subjective humour of Cervantes and Ariosto[48] the dissolution of romantic art; and he regarded this series as completing the possibilities of art, though some interpreters think that by a self-contradiction he admitted the possibility of a fourth period, an art of the modern or future world. Indeed amongst his disciples we find Weiss rejecting the Oriental period in order to save the triadic division, and placing as third the modern period, synthesis of the ancient and the mediæval:[49] Vischer too inclines to recognize a modern or progressive period.[50]

These arbitrary constructions reappear in the works of positivist metaphysicians in the shape of an evolutionary or progressive history of art. Spencer dreamed of writing some sort of treatise on the subject, and in the published programme of his system (1860) we read that the third volume of his Principles of Sociology was to contain amongst other things a chapter on æsthetic progress "with the gradual differentiation of fine arts from primitive institutions and from each other, with their increasing variety in development, their progress in reality of expression and superiority of end." No grief need be felt that the chapter was left unwritten when we remember the samples of it preserved in the Principles of Psychology and already reviewed in these pages.[51]

The strong historical sense of our own day is leading us further and further away from the evolutionary or abstractly progressive theories which falsify the free and original movement of art. Fiedler remarked not without justice that unity and progress cannot be introduced into a history of art, and that the works of artists must be judged discretely as so many fragments of the life of the universe.[52] In recent times a remarkable student of the history of figurative art, Venturi, has tried to bring evolutionism into fashion, and has illustrated it in a History of the Madonna, in which the presentment of the Virgin is conceived as an organism which is born, grows, attains perfection, grows old and dies! Others have claimed for artistic history its true character, intolerant of outward curb and rule, drawing her ever-varied productions from the well-head of the infinite Spirit.[53]

Conclusion.

These hurried notes may suffice to show in how narrow a circle has hitherto moved the scientific criticism of the errors we have called "particular." Æsthetic needs to be surrounded and nourished by a watchful and vigorous critical literature drawing its life from her and forming in turn her safeguard and strength.