To Schopenhauer, no less than his idealistic predecessors, art beatifies; it is the flower of life; he who contemplates art is no longer an individual but a pure knowing subject, at liberty, free from desire, from pain, from time.[8]

Schopenhauer's system no doubt contains here and there premonitions of a better and more profound treatment of art. Schopenhauer, who was capable on occasion of clear and keen analysis, constantly insists that the forms of space and time must not be applied to the idea or to artistic contemplation, which admits of the general form of representation only.[9] From this he might have inferred that art, so far from being a superior and extraordinary level of consciousness, is actually its most immediate level, namely that which in its primitive simplicity precedes even common perception with its reference of objects to a position in the spatial and temporal series. To free oneself from common perception and to live in imagination does not mean rising to a Platonic contemplation of the ideas, but descending once more into the region of immediate intuition, becoming children again, as Vico had seen. On the other hand Schopenhauer had begun to examine the categories of Kant with an unprejudiced eye; he was not satisfied with the two forms of intuition, and wished to add to them a third, causality.[10] In conclusion, we note that, like his predecessors, he makes a comparison between art and history, with this difference and advantage over the idealist authors of the philosophy of history, that for him history was irreducible to concepts; it was contemplation of the individual, and therefore not science. Had he persevered in his comparison between art and history, he would have arrived at a better solution than that at which he stopped; that is to say, that the matter of history is the particular in its particularity and contingency, while that of art is that which is, and is always identical.[11] But instead of pursuing these happy ideas Schopenhauer preferred to play variations on the themes fashionable in his day.

Most astounding of all is the fact that a dry intellectualist, the avowed enemy of idealism, of dialectic and of speculative constructions, head of the school calling itself realistic or the school of exact philosophy, Johann Friedrich Herbart, when he turns his attention to Æsthetic, turns mystic too, though in a slightly different way. How weightily he speaks when expounding his philosophical method! Æsthetic must not bear the blame of the faults into which metaphysic has fallen; we must make it an independent study, and detach it from all hypothesis about the universe. Nor must it be confounded with psychology or asked to describe the emotions awakened by the content of works of art, such as the pathetic or the comic, sadness or joy; its duty is to determine the essential character of art and beauty. In the analysis of particular cases of beauty and in registering what they reveal lies the way of salvation. These proposals and promises have misled numbers of people as to the nature of Herbart's Æsthetic. But ce sont là jeux de princes; by paying attention we shall see what Herbart meant by analysis of particular case; and how he held himself aloof from metaphysics.

Beauty, for him, consisted in relations: relations of tone, colour, line, thought and will; experience must decide which of these relations are beautiful, and æsthetic science consists solely in enumerating the fundamental concepts (Musterbegriffe) in which are summarized the particular cases of beauty. But these relations, Herbart thought, were not like physiological facts; they could not be empirically observed, e.g. in a psycho-physical laboratory. To correct this error it is only necessary to observe that these relations include not only tones, lines and colours, but also thoughts and will, and that they extend to moral facts no less than to objects of external intuition. He declares explicitly "No true beauty is sensible, although it frequently happens that sense-impressions precede and follow the intuition of beauty."[12] There is a profound distinction between the beautiful and the pleasant; for the pleasant needs no representation, while the beautiful consists in representation of relations, followed immediately in consciousness by a judgment, an appendix (Zusatz) which expresses unqualified approbation ("es gefällt!"). And while the pleasant and the unpleasant "in the progress of culture gradually become transient and unimportant, Beauty stands out more and more as something permanent and possessed of undeniable value."[13] The judgment of taste is universal, eternal, immutable: "the complete representation (vollendete Vorstellung) of the same relations is always followed by the same judgment; just as the same cause always produces the same effect. This happens at all times and in all circumstances, conditions and complications, which gives to the particularity of certain cases the appearance of a universal rule. Granted that the elements of a relation are universal concepts, it is plain that although in judging we think only of the content of these concepts, the judgment must have a sphere as large as that common to the two concepts."[14] Herbart considers æsthetic judgements as a general class comprising ethical judgements as a subdivision: "amongst other beauties is to be distinguished morality, as a thing not only of value in itself but as actually determining the unconditioned value of persons"; within morality in the narrowest sense is distinguished in turn justice.[15] The five ethica ideas guiding moral life (internal liberty, perfection, benevolence, equity and justice) are five æsthetic ideas or rather æsthetic concepts applied to relations of will.

Herbart looks on art as a complex fact, the combination of an extra-æsthetic element, content, which may have logical or psychological or any other kind of value, and a purely æsthetic element, form, which is an application of the fundamental æsthetic concepts. Man looks for that which is diverting, instructive, moving, majestic, ridiculous; and "all these are mingled with the beautiful in order to procure favour and interest for the work. The beautiful thus assumes various complexions, and becomes graceful, magnificent, tragic, or comic; it can become all these because the æsthetic judgement, in itself calmly serene, tolerates the company of the most diverse excitations of the soul which are no part of itself."[16] But all these things have nothing to do with beauty. In order to discover the objectively beautiful or ugly, one must make abstraction from every predicate concerning the content. "In order to recognize the objectively beautiful or ugly in poetry, one must show the difference between this and that thought, and the discussion will concern itself with thoughts; to recognize it in sculpture, one must show the difference between this and that outline, and the discussion will turn upon outlines; to recognize it in music, one should show the difference between this and that tone, and the discussion will turn upon tones. Now, such predicates as 'magnificent, charming, graceful' and so forth contain nothing whatever about tones, outlines or thoughts, and therefore tell us nothing about the objectively beautiful in poetry, sculpture, or music; indeed they rather lead us to believe in the existence of an objective beauty to which thought, outline, or tone are equally accidental, which may be approached by receiving impressions from poetry, sculpture, music and so forth, obliterating the object and giving oneself up to the pure emotion of mind."[17] Very different is the æsthetic judgement, the "cold judgement of the connoisseur" who considers exclusively form, i.e. objectively pleasant formal relations. This abstraction from the content in order to contemplate pure form is the catharsis produced by art. Content is transitory, relative, subject to moral law and liable to moral judgement: form is permanent, absolute, free.[18] Concrete art may be the sum of two or more values; but the æsthetic fact is form alone.

The reader who goes behind appearances and discounts diversities of terminology will not fail to observe the close similarity of the æsthetic doctrine of Herbart to that of Kant. In Herbart we again find the distinction between free and adherent beauty, and between form and the sensuous stimulus (Reiz) attached to form: we find an affirmation of the existence of pure beauty, the object of necessary and universal, but not discursive, judgements; lastly, we find a certain connexion between beauty and morality, between Æsthetic and Ethics. In these matters Herbart is perhaps the most faithful follower and propagator of the thought of Kant, whose doctrine contains the germ of his own. In one passage he describes himself as "a Kantian, but of the year 1828"; and he is quite right, even in pointing out the exact difference in date. Amidst the errors and uncertainties of his æsthetic thought, Kant is rich in suggestion and scatters fertile seed; he belongs to a period when philosophy was still young and impressionable. Herbart, coming later, is dry and one-sided; he takes whatever is false in Kant's doctrine and hardens it into a system. If they had done little else, the Romanticists and idealists had at least united the theory of beauty to that of art, and destroyed the rhetorical and mechanical view; and they had brought into relief (frequently exaggerating, doubtless) various important characteristics of artistic activity. Herbart re-states the mechanical view, restores the duality, and presents a capricious, narrow, barren mysticism, devoid of all breath of artistic feeling.

XI

FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER

We have now reached a point when we are able to give ourselves an exact account of the signification and importance of the celebrated war waged for over a century in Germany between the Æsthetic of content (Gehaltsästhetik) and the Æsthetic of form (Formästhetik); a war which gave birth to vast works on the history of Æsthetic undertaken from one or other point of view, and sprang from Herbart's opposition to the idealism of Schelling, Hegel, and their contemporaries and followers. "Form" and "Content" are among the most equivocal words in the whole philosophical vocabulary, particularly in Æsthetic; sometimes, indeed, what one calls form, others call content. The Herbartians were specially given to quoting in their own defence Schiller's dictum, that the secret of art consists in "cancelling content by form." But what is there in common between Schiller's concept of "form," which placed the æsthetic activity side by side with the moral and intellectual, and Herbart's "form," which does not penetrate or enliven, but clothes and adorns a content? Hegel, on the other hand, often gives the name "form" to what Schiller would call "matter" (Stoff), that is, the sensible matter which it is the business of spiritual energy to dominate. Hegel's "content" is the idea, the metaphysical truth, the constituent element of beauty: Herbart's "content" is the emotional and intellectual element which falls outside beauty. The Æsthetic of "form" in Italy is an æsthetic of expressive activity; the form is neither a clothing nor a metaphysical idea nor sensible matter, but a representative or imaginative faculty with the power of framing impressions; yet there have been attempts to confute this Italian æsthetic formalism with the same arguments that are used against German æsthetic formalism, a totally different thing in every respect. And so forth. Having given a plain account of the thoughts of the post-Kantian æstheticians, we shall be able to appreciate their opponents without seeking light from their obscure terminology or allowing ourselves to be misled by the banners they wave. The antithesis between the Æsthetic of content and that of form, the Æsthetic of idealism and that of realism, the Æsthetic of Schelling, Solger, Hegel and Schopenhauer and that of Herbart, will appear in its true light, as the lamily quarrel between two conceptions of art united by a common mysticism, although one is destined almost to meet with truth during its long journey, while the other wanders ever further away.

The first half of the nineteenth century was for Germany a period of many fine-sounding philosophical formulæ: subjectivism, objectivism, subjective—objectivism; abstract, concrete, abstract-concrete; idealism, realism, idealism—realism; between pantheism and theism Krause inserted his pan-en-theism. In the midst of this uproar, in which the second-rate men shouted down the first-rate and made good their claim to their only true property, namely words, it is not surprising that a few modest clear thinkers, philosophers who preferred to think about realities, should have the worst of it and remain unheard and unnoticed, lost among the roaring crowd or labelled with a false ticket.

This, at least, seems to have been the lot of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose æsthetic doctrine is amongst the least known although it is perhaps the most noteworthy of the day.

Schleiermacher delivered his first lectures on Æsthetic at Berlin University in 1819, and from that date he began to study the subject seriously with a view to writing a book on it. He repeated his lectures on two occasions, in 1825 and 1832-1833; but his death, which occurred in the following year, prevented him from carrying out his plan, and all we know of his thoughts on Æsthetic comes from his lectures, as collected by his pupils and published in 1842.[1] A Herbartian historian of Æsthetic, Zimmermann, attacks the posthumous work of Schleiermacher with real ferocity; after twenty pages of invective and sarcasm he concludes by asking, how could his pupils so dishonour their great master by publishing such a mass of waste paper, "all play upon words, sophistical conceits and dialectical subtleties"?[2] Nor was the idealistic historian Hartmann much more benevolent when he describes the work as "a confused mess in which, among much that is merely trivial, many half-truths and exaggerations, one can detect a few acute observations"; and says that, in order to make bearable "such unctuous afternoon sermons delivered by a preacher in his dotage," it must be shortened by three-quarters; and that, "as regards fundamental principles," it is simply useless, offering no innovations upon concrete idealism as presented by Hegel and others; and that, in any case, it seems impossible "to attach it to any line of thought except the Hegelian, to which Schleiermacher's contribution is only of second-rate importance." He further observes that Schleiermacher was primarily a theologian, and in philosophy more or less an amateur.[3] Now it cannot be denied that Schleiermacher's doctrine has reached us in a hazy form, by no means free from uncertainties and contradictions; and, which is more important, it is here and there affected for the worse by the influence of contemporary metaphysics. But, side by side with these defects, what excellent method, really scientific and philosophical; what a number of cornerstones well and truly laid; what wealth of new truths, and of difficulties and problems not suspected or discussed before his day!

Schleiermacher considered Æsthetic as an essentially modern line of thought, and drew a sharp distinction between the Poetics of Aristotle, which never shakes itself free from the empirical standpoint of the maker of rules, and what Baumgarten tried to do in the eighteenth century. He praised Kant for having been the first truly to include Æsthetic among the philosophical sciences, and recognized that in Hegel artistic activity had attained the highest elevation by being brought into connexion and almost into equality with religion and philosophy. But he was not satisfied either with the followers of Baumgarten when they degenerated into the absurd attempt to construct a science or theory of sensuous pleasure, or with the Kantian point of view which made its principal aim the consideration of taste; or with the philosophy of Fichte, in which art became a means of education; or with the more widely received opinion which placed at the centre of Æsthetic the vague and equivocal concept of Beauty. Schiller pleased him by having called attention to the moment of artistic spontaneity or productiveness, and he praised Schelling for having laid stress on the importance of the figurative arts, which lend themselves less easily than poetry to facile and illusory moralistic interpretations.[4] Having with the utmost clearness excluded from Æsthetic the study of practical rules as empirical, and therefore irreducible to a science, he assigned to Æsthetic the task of determining the proper position of artistic activity in the scheme of ethics.[5]

To avoid falling into error over this terminology, we must call to mind that the philosophy of Schleiermacher followed the ancient traditions in its tripartite division into Dialectic, Ethics and Physics. Dialectic corresponds with ontology; Physics embraces all the sciences of natural facts; Ethics includes the study of all free activities of mankind (language, thought, art, religion and morality). Ethics represented to him not only the science of morality but what others name Psychology or, better still, the Science or Philosophy of the Spirit. This explanation once given, Schleiermacher's point of departure seems to be the only one just and permissible, and we shall not be surprised when he talks of will, of voluntary acts and so on, where others would have simply spoken of activity or spiritual energy; he even endows such expressions with a broader meaning than that conferred upon them by practical philosophy.

A double distinction may be made amongst human activities. In the first place, there are activities which we presume to be constituted in the same manner in all men (such as the logical activity) and are called activities of identity; and others whose diversity is presumed, which are called activities of difference or individual activities. Secondly, there are activities which exhaust themselves in the internal life, and others which actualize themselves in the external world: immanent activities and practical activities. To which of the two classes in each of the two orders does artistic activity belong? There can be no doubt of its different modes of development, if not actually in each individual person, at least in different peoples and nations; therefore it belongs properly to activities of difference or individual activities.[6] As for the other distinction, it is true that art does realize itself in the external world, but this fact is something superadded ("ein später Hinzukommendes") "which stands to the internal fact as the communication of thought by means of speech or writing stands to thought itself": art's true work is the internal image ("das innere Bild ist das eigentliche Kunstwerk"). Exceptions to this might be adduced, such as mimicry; but they would be apparent only. Between a really angry man and the actor who plays the part of an angry man on the stage there is this difference: in the second case anger appears as controlled and therefore beautiful; that is, the internal image is in the actor's soul interposed between the fact of passion and its physical manifestation.[7] Artistic activity "belongs to those human activities in which we presuppose the individual in its differentiation; it belongs equally to those activities developing essentially within themselves and not completing themselves in any external world. Art, therefore, is an immanent activity in which we presuppose differentiation." Internal, not practical: individual, not universal or logical.

But if art be one form of thought, there must be one form of thought in which identity is presupposed, and another in which difference is presupposed. We do not look for truth in poetry; or, rather, we do look for truth, but for one that is totally different from that objective truth to which there must correspond some being, either universal or individual (scientific and historical truth). "When a character in a poem is said to be devoid of truth, a slur is cast on the given poem; but if the character is said to be a pure invention, corresponding with no reality, that is quite a different matter." The truth of a poetic character consists in the coherence with which a single person's divers modes of thinking and acting are represented: even in portraits it is not an exact correspondence with an objective reality that makes the thing a work of art. From art and poetry "springs no iota of knowledge" (das Geringste vom Wissen); "it expresses but the truth of the single consciousness." There are then "productions of thought and of sensible intuitions, opposed to the other productions because they do not presuppose identity, and they express the singular as such."[8]

The domain of art is immediate self-consciousness (unmittelbare Selbstbewusstsein), which must be carefully distinguished from the thought or concept of the ego or of the determinate ego. This latter is the consciousness of identity in the diversity of moments; immediate self-consciousness is "diversity itself, of which one must be aware, since life in its entirety is but the development of consciousness." In this domain art has often been confused with two facts which accompany it: sensuous consciousness (the feeling of pleasure and pain), and religion. A double confusion, of which the sensationalists fall into the first half and Hegel into the second; Schleiermacher clears it up by proving that art is free productivity, whereas sensuous pleasure and religious feeling, however different in other ways, are both determined by an objective fact (äussere Sein).[9]

The better to understand this free productivity, we must further circumscribe the domain of immediate consciousness. In this we can find nothing more helpful than comparing it with the images produced by dreams. The artist has his own dreams: he dreams with open eyes, and from among the thick-thronging images of this dream-state those having sufficient energy alone become works of art, the rest remaining a mere background from which the others stand out. All the essential elements of art are found in the dream-state, which is the production of free thoughts and sensuous intuitions consisting of mere images. Certainly something is lacking in dreams, and they differ from art not only in their absence of technique, which has already been excluded as irrelevant to art, but in another way, viz. that a dream is a chaotic fact, without stability, order, connexion or measure. But when some sort of order is introduced into the chaos the difference at once disappears, and the likeness to art merges in identity. This internal activity which introduces order and measure, fixes and determines the image, is that which distinguishes art from a dream or transforms a dream into art. It often involves struggle, labour, the obligation to stem the involuntary flood of internal images; in a word, it means reflexion or deliberation. But the dream and the cessation of dreaming are equally indispensable elements of art. There must be production of thoughts and images and, together with such production, there must be measure, determination and unity, "otherwise each image would be confused with its neighbour and have no definiteness." The instant of inspiration (Begeisterung) is as essential as that of deliberation (Besonnenheit).[10]

But in order to arrive at artistic truth it is also I necessary (here Schleiermacher's thought becomes less clear and accurate) that the singular be accompanied by consciousness of the species; consciousness of the self as individual man is impossible without consciousness of mankind; nor is a single object true unless referred to its universal. In a pictured landscape "every tree must possess natural truth, that is to say, it must be contemplated as a specimen of a given kind; similarly, the whole complex of natural and individual life must have effective truth of nature and constitute a single harmony. Just because in art we do not strive after the production of individual figures in themselves and for themselves, but their internal truth as well, we commonly assign to them a high place as being a free realization of that in which all cognition has its value, that is to say, in the principle that all forms of being are inherent in the human spirit. If this principle fails, truth is no longer possible; scepticism only remains." The productions of art are the ideal or typical figures which real nature would create were it not impeded by external influences.[11] "The artist creates a figure on the basis of a general scheme, rejecting whatever may hinder or impede the play of the living forces of reality; such a production, founded on a general scheme, is what we call the Ideal."[12]

In spite of all these determinations, Schleiermacher did not apparently intend to limit the artist's scope. He remarks, "When an artist represents something really given, whether portrait, landscape or single human figure, he renounces the freedom of productivity and adheres to the real."[13] There is a twofold tendency at work in the artist: towards perfection of type, and towards representation of natural reality. An artist must not fall into the abstractness of the type or into the unmeaningness of empirical reality.[14] If in flower-painting it is necessary to bring out the specific type, a much more complete individualisation is demanded when representing man, owing to the lofty position which he occupies.[15] Representation of the ideal in the real does not exclude "an infinite variety, such as is found in actual reality." "For instance, the human face wavers between the ideal and caricature, in its moral conformation no less than in its physical. Every human face contains elements of disfigurement (Verbildung,) but it has also something by which it is a determinate modification of human nature; this does not appear openly, but a practised eye can seize it and ideally complete the face in question."[16] Schleiermacher is keenly aware of the difficulties and perplexities of' such problems as the question whether there exists one or many ideals of the human face.[17] He observes that the two views which strive for mastery in the field of poetry may be extended to art as a whole. Some assert that poetry and art should represent the perfect, the ideal, that which would have been produced by nature, had she not been prevented by mechanical forces; others reject the ideal as incapable of realisation and prefer that the artist should depict man as he really is, with those perturbing elements which in reality belong to him no less than his ideal qualities. Each view is a half-truth: it is the duty of art to represent the ideal as well as the real, the subjective as well as the objective.[18] The comic element, that is the unideal and the faulty ideal, is included in the circle of art.[19]

In respect to morality, art is free just as philosophical speculation is free: its essence excludes practical and moral effects. This leads to the proposition that "there is no difference between various works of art, except in so far as they can be compared in respect of artistic perfection" (Vollkommenheit in der Kunst.) "Given an artistic object perfect of its kind, it has an absolute value which cannot be increased or diminished by anything else. If motions of the will could truly be described as consequences of works of art, a different standard of values would apply to works of art: and since the objects which an artist may depict are not all equally adapted to influence volition, a scale of values would exist which did not depend on artistic perfection." Nor must we confound the judgement passed upon the varied and complex personality of the artist himself with the strictly æsthetic judgement passed upon his work. "In this respect the biggest, most complicated canvas is on a level with the smallest arabesque, the longest poem with the shortest: the value of a work of art depends on the perfect manner in which the external corresponds to the internal."[20]

Schleiermacher rejects the doctrine of Schiller because in his opinion it makes art a sort of game or pastime in contrast to the serious affairs of life: a view, he says, for business men to whom their business is the only serious thing. Artistic activity is universally human, a man devoid of it is inconceivable; although, of course, there are in this respect great differences betwixt man and man, running from the mere desire to enjoy art to real taste, and from this again to productive genius.[21]

The artist makes use of instruments which, by their nature, are framed not for the individual but for the universal; of this kind is language. But it is the business of poetry to extract the individual from language which is universal without giving to its productions the form of the antithesis between individual and universal which is proper to science. Of the two elements of language, the musical and the logical, the poet claims the first for his own ends and constrains the other to awaken individual images. In comparison with pure science as in comparison with the individual image, there is something irrational about language: but the tendencies of speculation and of poetry are always contrary, even in their use of language; the former tends to make language approximate to mathematical formulæ; the latter to imagery (Bild)[22]

Leaving out many details which will be touched on in their proper places, the foregoing is a fair summary of the heads of Schleiermacher's æsthetic thought. Adding up the accounts of the whole statement of views, on the side of error and oversight we find: first, ideas or types are not wholly excluded, in spite of all Schleiermacher's care and anxiety to safeguard artistic individualisation and to make the ideas and types superfluous. Secondly, there is still, undefeated and unexpelled, a certain residue of abstract formalism, visible at various points of his theories.[23] Thirdly, the definition of art as an activity of mere difference may be diluted but is not destroyed by making art a difference of complexes of individuals, a national difference. A closer reflexion on the history of art, a recognition of the possibility of appreciating the art of various nations and various times, a more patient investigation into the moment of artistic reproduction, even an examination of the relation between science and art, would have led Schleiermacher to treat this difference as empirical and surmountable, still holding firmly to the distinctive character (individual as opposed to universal) he assigned to art in comparison with science. Fourthly, he did not recognize the identity of æsthetic activity with linguistic, and failed to make it the basis of all other theoretic activity. It would seem, moreover, that Schleiermacher had no clear ideas concerning that artistic element which enters into the constitution of historic narrative and is indispensable as the concrete form of science; or concerning language, taken not as a complex of abstract means of expression but as expressive activity.

These defects and uncertainties may perhaps be attributable in part to the fact that his thoughts on æsthetic have reached us in an inchoate form, very far from a mature development. But if on the other hand we wish to cast up the sum of his very striking merits, it will suffice to run over the list of accusations heaped upon him by the two historians before mentioned, Zimmermann and Hartmann. Schleiermacher has denuded Æsthetic of its imperative character; he recognizes in it a form of thought differing from logical thought; he gives this science a non-metaphysical and merely anthropological character; he denies the concept of beauty, substituting that of artistic perfection, and actually affirms the æsthetic equivalence of small and great works of art, so long as each is perfect in its own sphere; he considers the æsthetic fact as pure human productivity: and so on and so forth. All these criticisms are meant for blame and are really praise; for what is blame to the mind of a Zimmermann or a Hartmann, is to ours praise. In the metaphysical orgy of his day, in the perpetual building and pulling down of more or less arbitrary systems, Schleiermacher the theologian, with philosophic acumen, fixed his eye upon what was really characteristic of the æsthetic fact and succeeded in defining its properties and connexions; when he failed to see clearly and wandered from the track, he never abandoned analysis for fantastic caprice. By his discovery that the obscure region of immediate consciousness is also that of the æsthetic fact, he seems to bid his distracted contemporaries listen to the old adage: Hic Rhodus, hic salta.