With similar indecision Edmund Burke wavers between the principle of imitation and other heterogeneous or imaginary principles in his book, An Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756). He observes, "Natural properties contained in an object give pleasure or displeasure to the imagination: beyond this, however, imagination may delight in the likeness of a copy to its original"; he asserts that from "these two reasons" arises the whole pleasure of imagination.[10]

Without dwelling further on the second, he proceeds to a lengthy discussion of the natural qualities which should be found in an object of sensible beauty: "Firstly, comparative smallness; secondly, smooth surface; thirdly, variety in disposition of the parts; fourthly, that it have no angularity, all lines fusing one in another; fifthly, a structure of great delicacy betraying no signs of violence; sixthly, vivid colouring without glare or harshness; seventhly, if it have any glaring colour, let it be different from the background." These are the properties of beauty working in harmony with nature and least liable to suffer from caprice and differences of taste.[11]

These books of Hogarth and Burke are generally described as classical; if so, they belong to the type of classic that fails to convince. To a somewhat higher type belongs the Elements of Criticism (1761) of Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, who seeks "the true principles of the fine arts" with the object of converting criticism into "a rational science," and to this end chooses "the upward path of facts and experiments." Home confines himself to feelings derived from objects of sight and hearing, which, in so far as unaccompanied by desires, are more truly described as simple feelings (emotions, not passions). These occupy a middle position between mere sense-impressions and intellectual or moral ideas, and are therefore akin to both; and it is from these that the pleasures of beauty are derived. Beauty is divided into beauty of relation and intrinsic beauty.[12] Of the latter, Home's only account is that regularity, simplicity, uniformity, proportion, order and other pleasing qualities have been "so disposed by the Author of nature in order to increase our happiness here on earth which, as is clearly shown in numberless instances, is not foreign to his care." This notion is confirmed when he reflects that "our taste for such details is not accidental, but uniform and universal, being a very part of our nature"; adding that "regularity, uniformity, order and simplicity help to facilitate perception and make it possible for us to form clearer conception of objects than it would be possible to gain by the most earnest attention were such qualities not present." Proportions are often combined with a view to utility, "as we see that the best proportioned amongst animals are also the strongest; but there are also many examples in which this conjunction does not hold good"; wherefore the wisest plan "is to rest content with the final cause just mentioned: that of the increase of our happiness intended by the Author of nature."[13] In his Essay on Taste (1758) and on Genius (1774) Alexander Gérard employs by turns, according to the various forms of art, the principles of association, of direct pleasure, of expression, and even of moral sense: the same kind of explanation reappears in another Essay on Taste by Alison (1792).

It is impossible to classify works of such calibre, almost wholly lacking as they are in scientific method; on each page their writers pass from physiological sensationalism to moralism; from the imitation of nature to mysticism and transcendent finalism without the slightest sense of incongruity. It would be absurd to take them seriously; in comparison it is almost refreshing to come across a frank hedonist in the German, Ernst Plainer, who interpreted Hogarth's inquiry into lines after a fashion of his own and was unable to see anything in æsthetic facts except a reverberation of sexual pleasure. Where can we find a beauty, he asks, that is not derived from the female figure, the centre of all beauty? Undulating lines are beautiful because found in a woman's body; beautiful are all movements distinctively feminine; beautiful the tones of music melting one into another; beautiful the poem where one thought embraces another with tenderness and facility.[14] Condillac's sensationalism had already shown itself wholly incapable of understanding æsthetic productivity; the associationism especially promoted by the work of Hume fared no better.

The Dutchman Hemsterhuis considered beauty as a phenomenon born of the meeting between sensibility, which gives multiplicity, and the internal sense, which tends to unity; hence the beautiful is "that which exhibits the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time." Man, to whom it is not permitted to attain ultimate unity, finds in beauty an approximate unity which gives him a pleasure somewhat analogous with the joy of love. This theory of Hemsterhuis, in which elements of mysticism and sensationalism mingle with glimpses of truth, developed later into the sentimentalism of Jacobi, for whom the totality of Truth and Goodness and even the Supersensible itself are sensibly present to the soul in the form of beauty.[15]

Platonism or, more accurately, neo-Platonism was revived by the creator of the history of figurative art, Winckelmann (1764). Contemplation of the masterpieces of antique plastic art, and the impression of superhuman loftiness and divine indifference which they create all the more irresistibly because we cannot reawaken the life they once possessed or understand their real significance, led Winckelmann, and others with him, to the conception of a Beauty which, descending from the seventh heaven of the divine Idea, embodied itself in works of this description. Baumgarten's follower Mendelssohn had denied the enjoyment of beauty to God: the neo-Platonist Winckelmann gave it back to him and lodged it in his bosom.

"Wise men who have meditated upon the causes of universal Beauty, seeking her amongst created things and trying to gain the contemplation of Supreme Beauty, have placed it in the perfect harmony of creatures with their ends and of their parts with one another. But as this is equivalent to perfection, which man is incapable of attaining, our concept of universal beauty remains indeterminate, and arises by means of particular cognitions which, when accurately collected and fitted together, give us the highest idea we can attain of human beauty, which we elevate in proportion as we raise it above matter. But, again, since the Creator deals out perfection to all his creatures in the proportion that befits them, and since every concept rests on some cause which must be sought outside the concept itself, the cause of Beauty which is to be found in every created thing cannot be sought in anything outside these created things. For this reason, and because our cognitions are comparative concepts, whereas Beauty cannot be compared with anything higher, it is difficult to attain a distinct and universal cognition of Beauty."[16] The only way out of this difficulty and others like it is the recognition that "supreme beauty resides in God": "the concept of human beauty becomes the more perfect in proportion as it can be thought more in conformity and agreement with supreme Being, which is distinguished from matter by its own unity and indivisibility. This conception of Beauty is as a spirit which, freed by fire from the prison of matter, strives to conjure up a creature in the likeness of the first reasonable creature formed by the divine intelligence. The forms of such an image are simple and continuous and within this unity they are varied and for that very reason harmonious."[17] 2 To these characteristics is added "lack of significance" (Unbezeichnung), since supreme beauty cannot be described with points or fines different from those which alone can constitute that beauty; its form "is not peculiar to this or that determinate person, neither does it express any state of feeling or sensation of passion, things which disturb unity and overcloud beauty." Winckelmann concludes: "We look upon Beauty as a purest water drawn from the centre of the spring; the less taste it has the higher it is esteemed because free from all impurities."[18]

To perceive pure beauty, a special faculty is required, which certainly is not sense, but may perhaps be intellect or even, as Winckelmann says, "a fine internal sense" free from all intentions or passions of instinct, inclination or pleasure. Having asserted beauty to be something supersensible, it is not surprising that Winckelmann should wish, if not wholly to exclude colour, at least to reduce it to a minimum, and treat it not as a constitutive element in beauty but as secondary and ancillary.[19] True beauty is given in form: by which he means line and surface, forgetting that these are only apprehended by the senses, and could not be seen without being in some way coloured.

When error refuses to retire, hermit-like, to the narrow cell of a brief aphorism, it finds itself condemned to self-contradiction in order to live at all in the world of concrete facts and problems. Although composed with a view to stating a theory, the work of Winckelmann always led him among concrete historical facts clamouring to be brought into relation with his formally stated idea of supreme beauty. In his admission of line-drawing and his further admission, on a lower plane, of colour, we have two compromises already; to which a third is added in his principle of Expression. "Since human nature has no state intermediate between pain and pleasure" and as living creature without such feelings is inconceivable, "the human figure must be represented in a condition of action and passion, which artists call expression." Hence Winckelmann, after dealing with Beauty, goes on to treat of Expression.[20] He then found himself obliged to effect a fourth compromise between the single constant supreme beauty and individual beauties; for while he preferred the male to the female body as a completer embodiment of perfect beauty, he could not shut his eyes to the obvious fact that we know and admire beautiful women's bodies and even beautiful animals' bodies.

Friend and, in a sense, collaborator of Winckelmann was Raphæl Mengs the artist, no less eager than his archæological fellow-countryman to understand the nature of that beauty which the one studied as a critic while the other produced it as a painter. Remarking, writes Mengs, that of the two chief duties of a painter, the imitation of appearances and the selection of the most beautiful objects, much has been written on the former, while the latter "has scarcely been touched by the modems, who would have been ignorant of the art of drawing were it not for the statues of ancient Greece";[21] pondering this, "I read, asked and looked at everything likely to throw light on the subject, but never was I satisfied; either they spoke of beautiful things or of qualities which are the attributes of beauty, or they pretended to explain, as the saying is, the obscure by the more obscure, or even confused the beautiful with the pleasing: so that finally I determined to search for the nature of beauty on my own account."[22] One of his works on this subject was published during his lifetime by the advice and assistance of Winckelmann (1761); many others appeared posthumously (1780), all were reprinted several times and translated into several languages. In his Dreams of Beauty he says, "I have been sailing a long time on a vast sea seeking the understanding of beauty, and still I am far from any shore and in great doubt how to shape my course: gazing around, my sight is confounded by the immensity of the subject."[23] In truth it seems as though Mengs never arrived at a formula satisfactory to himself, although he conformed more or less to Winckelmann's doctrine that "beauty consists in material perfection according to our ideas; and since God alone is perfect, beauty is divine"; it is the "visible idea of perfection" and stands in the same relation to it as does a visible to a mathematical point. Our ideas proceed from the purposes which the Creator has willed to fulfil in various things; hence the multiplicity of beauties. In general, Mengs finds the types of things in natural species: e.g. "a stone, of which we have the idea that it should be uniform in colour"; which" is called ugly if it happen to be spotted"; or a child "would be ugly if he were like a man of mature age, just as a man is ugly when shaped like a woman, and a woman when she is like a man." He adds surprisingly, "As among stones there is but one perfect species, the diamond; among metals, gold; and among animated creatures, man only; so there is difference and distinction in every order, and very rarely is there perfection."[24] In his Dreams of Beauty he considers beauty as "a middle disposition, including perfection on the one hand and the pleasing on the other"; in reality it is a third thing, differing from perfection and the pleasing, and deserving a special name for itself.[25] The art of painting arises from four sources: beauty, significant or expressive character, the pleasing united to harmony, and colouring. Mengs finds the first amongst the ancients, the second in Raphæl, the third in Correggio and the fourth in Titian.[26] From this empirical studio-gossip he rouses himself to exclaim, "The force of beauty so transports me that I will tell thee, reader, what I feel. All nature is beautiful, and so is virtue; beautiful are forms and proportions; beautiful are appearances and beautiful the causes thereof; more beautiful is reason, most beautiful of all is the great first cause."[27]

An attenuated, that is to say, a less metaphysical, echo of Winckelmann's theory is found in Lessing (1766), who infused a new spirit into the literature and social life of the Germany of his time. According to Lessing the aim of art is "delight"; and since delight is a "superfluous thing" it seems reasonable that the legislator should not allow to art that liberty which is indispensable to science in her search for truth, the soul's necessity. For the Greeks painting was what by its nature it ought to be, "the imitation of beautiful bodies." "Its (Hellenic) cultivator represented nothing but the beautiful: common beauty of a low grade served him as an accidental subject, an exercise, a diversion. The attractiveness of his work must depend simply and solely on the perfection of his subject: he was far too true an artist to wish his audience to content itself with the barren pleasure arising from mere resemblance or from the inspection of skilful workmanship: nothing in his art was dearer to him, nothing seemed more noble, than the end at which it aimed."[28] Pictorial representation must exclude everything unpleasing or ugly; "painting as imitation may express ugliness: painting as a fine art will refuse to do so: all visible objects belong to art taken under the former title: the latter may claim only such objects as awaken pleasing sensations." If, on the contrary, ugliness may be represented by the poet, the reason is this: poetic description "conveys a less displeasing sense of bodily malformation which, in the end, almost loses its character as such; unable to use it for itself, the poet uses it as a means to provoke certain mixed feelings (the ridiculous, the terrible), in which we are content to remain, in the absence of any purely pleasant feelings."[29] In his Dramaturgie (1767) Lessing takes his stand upon the Aristotelian Poetics: it is well known that not only did he approve of rules in general but he believed those laid down by Aristotle to be as incontrovertible as the theorems of Euclid. His polemic against French writers and critics is waged in the name of probability, not to be confounded with historical accuracy. He understood the universal as a sort of average of what appears in individuals, and catharsis as a conversion of passions into virtuous dispositions, asserting it as beyond doubt that the aim of all poetry is to inspire a love for virtue.[30] He follows the example of Winckelmann in introducing the concept of ideal beauty into the doctrine of figurative art: "expression of corporeal beauty is the aim of painting: therefore supreme beauty of body is the supreme aim of art. But this supreme beauty of body is found in man only, and for him it exists only through the ideal. This ideal may be found among the brute creation in inferior degree; but is entirely absent from vegetable or inanimate nature." Landscape and flower painters are not really artists because "they imitate beauties possessed of no ideal: whereby they work by eye and hand alone, genius having little or no part in their compositions." Nevertheless, Lessing prefers a landscape painter to "the painter of historic pieces who, instead of making beauty his aim, merely depicts a crowd in order to show his cunning in simple expression, not in expression subordinate to beauty."[31] The ideal of bodily beauty then consists "chiefly in the ideal of form, but also in that of texture of the flesh, and in that of permanent expression. Mere colouring and transitory expression have no ideal since nature herself has placed no indelible seal upon them."[32] At the bottom of his heart Lessing dislikes colour; and when he finds the pen-sketches of painters showing "a life, a freedom, a brilliancy never to be found in their painted pictures," he asks himself "whether the most marvellous colouring can compensate so heavy a loss," and whether it is not to be wished "that painting in oils had never been invented"?[33]

Ideal beauty, that curious alliance between God and the subtle outline traced with pen or graver, that cold academical mysticism, came into fashion. In Italy (the home of Winckelmann and Mengs, who published many of their works in Italian) it was much discussed by artists, antiquaries and connoisseurs. The architect Francesco Milizia professed himself a follower of "the principles of Sulzer and Mengs";[34] the Spaniard d'Azara, living in Italy, edited and annotated Mengs, adding his own definition of beauty: "The union of the perfect and the pleasing made visible";[35] another Spaniard, Arteaga, one of the many Jesuit refugees in Italy, wrote a treatise on Ideal Beauty (1789);[36] the Englishman Daniel Webb on coming to Rome and making the acquaintance of Mengs seized upon the ideas he heard him express on beauty, collected them and actually published them in a book anticipating Mengs' own.[37]

The first voice of dissent from this doctrine of ideal beauty was raised in 1764 by a small circle of Italians who asserted the characteristic to be the principle of art. As such appears to be the necessary interpretation of the little Essay on Beauty written by Guiseppe Spalletti in the form of a letter to Mengs, with whom Spalletti had discussed the subject "in the solitudes of Grottaferrata," and who had urged him to put all his thoughts in writing.[38] Its polemical character, though not openly asserted, is discernible in every page. "Truth in general, conscientiously rendered by the artist, is the object of Beauty in general. When the soul finds those characteristics which wholly converge upon the matter which the work of art claims to represent, it judges that work beautiful. The same is true of the works of nature: if the soul perceives a man of fine proportions having the face of a lovely woman, which causes it to doubt whether the object before it be man or woman, it esteems that man ugly rather than the reverse, through deficiency of the characteristic of truth; if this can be said of natural Beauty, how much more can it be said of the Beauty of art." The pleasure given by Beauty is intellectual, that is to say, it is the pleasure of apprehending truth: when confronted by ugly things represented characteristically, man "delights in having increased his cognitions": Beauty, "with its property of supplying to the soul likeness, order, proportion, harmony and variety, provides it with an immense field for the construction of innumerable syllogisms, and by reasoning in this manner it will take pleasure in itself, in the object which arouses such pleasure, and in the feeling of its own perfection." Finally, the beautiful may be defined as "the inherent modification of the object under observation which presents it in the inevitably characteristic manner in which it is bound to appear."[39] In contrast to the fallacious profundity of Winckelmann and Mengs we welcome the sound good sense of this obscure Spalletti, upholder of the Aristotelian position against the revived neo-Platonism of the æstheticians.

Many years went by before a similar rebellion arose in Germany; at length in 1797 the art-historian Ludwig Hirt, basing his case on ancient works of art which depicted all things, even things utterly vulgar and ugly, ventured to deny the view that ideal beauty is the principle of art, and that expression has only a secondary place, above which it must not rise for fear of disturbing ideal beauty. For the ideal he substituted the characteristic, as a principle to be applied equally to gods, heroes or animals. Character is "that individuality by which form, movement, signs, physiognomy and expression, local colour, fight, shade and chiaroscuro are distinguished and represented in the manner demanded by the object."[40] Another historian of art, Heinrich Meyer, who started from the position of Winckelmann and went on by adopting a series of compromises, finally asserting an ideal of trees and landscape side by side with the ideal of man and various other animals, tried to find an intermediate position between this doctrine and Hirt's, in the course of controversy with the latter. And Wolfgang von Goethe, forgetful of his youthful days when he chanted the praises of Gothic architecture, returning home from an Italian tour impregnated with Greece and Rome in 1798, also sought a middle term between Beauty and Expression; dwelling on the thought of certain characteristic contents which should supply the artist with forms of beauty to be by him remodelled and developed into complete beauty. The characteristic was thus the mere point of departure, and beauty was simply the result of the artist's elaboration: "we must start from the characteristic" (says he) "in order to attain the beautiful."[41]

VIII

IMMANUEL KANT

Of all these writers, Winckelmann and Mengs, Home and Hogarth, Lessing and Goethe, none was a philosopher in the true sense of the word: not even those who like Meier laid claim to the title, nor those who had some gifts for philosophy like Herder or Hamann. After Vico, the next European mind of real speculative genius is Immanuel Kant, who now comes before us in his turn.

That Kant took up the problem of philosophy where Vico laid it down (not, of course, in a directly historical, but in an ideal, sense) has already been noted by others.[1] How far he made an advance upon his predecessor and how far he failed to reach the same level it is not here our business to inquire; we must confine ourselves strictly to the consideration of Æsthetic questions.

Summarizing the results of such a consideration, we may say at once that though Kant holds an immensely important place in the development of German thought; though the book containing his examination of æsthetic facts is among his most influential works; and though in histories of Æsthetic written from the German point of view, which ignore practically the whole development of European thought from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Kant can pose as the man who discovered the problem of Æsthetic or solved it or brought it within sight of solution; yet in an unprejudiced and complete history whose aim is to take broad views and to consider not the popularity of a book or the historical importance of a nation but the intrinsic value of ideas, the judgement passed on Kant must be very different. Like Vico in the serious tenacity with which he reflected upon æsthetic facts, more fortunate than he in having a much larger stock of material gathered from preceding discussion and argument, Kant was at once unlike and less successful than Vico in that he was unable to attain a doctrine substantially true, and unable also to give his thoughts the necessary system and unity.

In fact, what was Kant's idea of art? Strange as our reply may seem to those who recollect the explicit and insistent war waged by him against the school of Wolff, and the concept of beauty as a perfection confusedly perceived, we must assert that Kant's idea of art was fundamentally the same as that of Baumgarten and the Wolffian school.[2] In that school his mind had been trained; he always had a great respect for Baumgarten whom in the Critique of Pure Reason he calls "that excellent analyst"; he chose the text of Baumgarten for two of his University lectures on Metaphysics, and that of Meier for his lecture on Logic (Vernunftlehre). Kant, like them, therefore considered Logic and Æsthetic (or theory of art) as conjoined sciences. They were thus described by him in his Scheme of Lectures in 1765, when he proposed, while expounding the critique of reason, to "throw a glance at that of taste, that is to say, at Æsthetic, since the rules of one apply to the other and each throws light upon the other."

In his University lectures he distinguished æsthetic truth from logical truth in the style of Meier; even citing the example of the beautiful rosy face of a girl which, when seen distinctly, i.e. through a microscope, ceases to be beautiful.[3] It is æsthetically true (said he) that a man once dead cannot come to life again, although this is in opposition to logic and moral truth: it is æsthetically true that the sun plunges into the sea, but it is false logically and objectively. To what degree it is necessary to combine logical truth with æsthetic the learned have never yet been able to decide; not even the greatest æstheticians. In order to become accessible, logical concepts must assume æsthetic forms; a garb to be abandoned only in the rational sciences which seek profundity. Æsthetic certainty is subjective: it is content with authority, i.e. the citation of the opinions of great men. On account of our weakness, for we are strongly attached to the sensible, æsthetic perfection often helps us to render our thoughts distinct. In this, examples and images co-operate; æsthetic perfection is the vehicle for logical perfection; taste is the analogue of intellect. There are logical truths which are not æsthetic truths: and on the other hand we must exclude from abstract philosophy exclamations and other sentimental commotions proper to the other truth. Poetry is a harmonious play of thoughts and sensations. Poetry and eloquence differ in this: in the former, thoughts adapt themselves to sensations; in the latter the contrary is the case. In these lectures Kant sometimes taught that poetry is anterior to eloquence because sensations come before thoughts; and he observed (perhaps under Herder's influence) that the poetry of Eastern peoples, lacking concepts, is wanting in unity and taste although rich in imaginative detail. Poetry formed out of the pure play of sensibility is doubtless a possibility, e.g. love-poems: but true poetry disdains such productions, concerned as they are with sensations which every one knows ought to be expelled from our breasts. True poetry must strive to present virtue and intellectual truth in sensible form, as has been done by Pope in his Essay on Man, in which he attempts to vivify poetry by means of reason. On other occasions Kant definitely says that logical perfection is the basis of every other, æsthetic perfection being merely an adornment of the logical; something of the latter may be omitted in order to appeal to the audience, but it must never be disguised or falsified.[4]

This is Baumgartenism pure and simple; unless we are prepared to look on these Lectures as representing a pre-critical period of thought, or an exoteric doctrine superseded eventually by Kant's own original esoteric ideas in his Critique of the Judgment (1790). Not to open such a controversy, let us put these Lectures on one side (although they often throw no little light on the signification of Kantian phrases and formulæ), and refuse to raise the question what pages of the Critique of the Judgment are derived from Baumgarten and Meier; he who reads the works of these disciples of Wolff and passes immediately to the Critique of Judgment often has the impression that the atmosphere surrounding him is unchanged. But if the Critique of Judgment itself be examined without prejudice it will be seen that Kant always adhered to Baumgarten's conception of art as the sensible and imaginative vesture of an intellectual concept.