XVII

ÆSTHETIC POSITIVISM AND NATURALISM

The ground lost by idealistic metaphysic was conquered in the latter half of the nineteenth century by positivistic and evolutionary metaphysic, a confused substitution of natural for philosophical sciences, and a hotch-potch of materialistic and idealistic, mechanical and theological theories, the whole crowned with scepticism and agnosticism. Characteristic of this trend of opinion was its contempt of history, especially the history of philosophy; which prevented its ever making that contact with the unbroken and age-long efforts of thinkers without which it is idle to hope for fertile work and true progress.

[SidenoteÆsthetic of H. Spencer.]

Spencer (the greatest positivist of his day), whilst discussing Æsthetic, actually did not know that he was dealing with problems for all, or almost all, of which solutions had been already proposed and discussed. At the beginning of his essay on the Philosophy of Style, he remarks innocently: "I believe nobody has ever sketched a general theory of the art of writing" (in 1852!); and in his Principles of Psychology (1855), touching the æsthetic feelings he remarks that he has some recollection of observations concerning the relation of art and play made "by some German author whose name I cannot recall" (Schiller!). Had his pages on Æsthetic been written in the seventeenth century, they would have won a low position amongst the early crude attempts at æsthetic speculation; in the nineteenth century, one knows not how to judge them. In his essay on The Useful and the Beautiful (1852-1854), he shows how the useful becomes beautiful when it ceases to be useful, illustrating this by a ruined castle useless for the purposes of modern life, but a suitable scene for picnic parties and a good subject for a picture to hang on a parlour wall; which leads him to identify the principle of evolution from the useful to the beautiful as contrast. In another essay on the Beauty of the Human Face (1852) he explains this beauty as a sign and effect of moral goodness; in that on Grace (1852) he considers the sentiment of the graceful as sympathy for power in conjunction with agility. In the Origin of Architectural Styles (1852-1854) he discovers the beauty of architecture as consisting in uniformity and symmetry, an idea which is aroused in a man looking at the bodily equilibrium of the higher animals or, as in Gothic architecture, by analogy with the vegetable kingdom; in his essay on Style, he places the cause of stylistic beauty in economy of effort; in his Origin and Function of Music (1857) he theorizes on music as the natural language of the passions, adapted to increase sympathy between men.[1] In his Principles of Psychology, he maintains that the æsthetic feelings arise from the overflow of exuberant energy in the organism, and distinguishes various degrees of them, from simple sensation to that accompanied by representative elements, and so on until perception is reached, with more complex elements of representation, then emotion, and, last of all, that state of consciousness which transcends sensation and perception. The most perfect form of æsthetic feeling is attained by the coincidence of the three orders of pleasures, a coincidence produced by the full action of their respective faculties with the least possible subtraction due to the painful effect of excessive activity. But it is very rarely that we experience æsthetic excitement of this kind and strength; almost all works of art are imperfect because they contain a mixture of artistic with anti-artistic effects; now the technique is unsatisfactory, now the emotion is of a low order. These works of art which are universally admired, are found when measured by this criterion to deserve a lower place than that accorded them by popular taste. "Beginning with the Greek epic and the representations of analogous legends given by their sculptors, tending to excite egoistic or ego-altruistic sentiments, and passing through the literature of the Middle Ages, equally impregnated with inferior sentiments, then through the works of the old masters, whose ideas and sentiments seldom compensate for the displeasing effect they inflict on our senses overrefined in study of appearances; and coming at last to the vaunted works of modern art, excellent for technical execution in many cases but deplorable for the emotions they arouse and express, such as Gérôme's battle-pieces, alternately sensual and sanguinary;—they are all far off indeed from the qualities deemed desirable, from the artistic forms corresponding to the highest forms of æsthetic feeling."[2] These last critical denunciations, like the theories noticed above, are mere substitutions of one word for another; "facility" for "grace"; "economy" for "beauty," and so on. Indeed, when one tries to define the exact philosophical position of Spencer, one can only possibly say that he wavers between sensationalism and moralism, and is never for a moment conscious of art as art.

The same oscillation is noticeable in other English writers such as Sully and Bain, in whom, however, we find more familiarity with works of art.[3] In his numerous essays and in Physiological Æsthetics (1877), Grant Allen collected a great many records of physiological experiments, all of which may be of supreme value to physiology, for aught we know to the contrary, but most assuredly are worthless from the point of view of Æsthetic. He keeps to the distinction between necessary or vital activity and the superfluous or that of play, and defines æsthetic pleasure as "the subjective concomitant of the normal sum of activity, not connected directly with the vital functions, in the terminal peripheric organs of the cerebrospinal nervous system."[4] Physiological processes considered as causes of pleasure in art are presented under other aspects by later investigators, who assert that such pleasure arises not only "from the activity of the visual organs and the muscular systems associated with them, but also from the participation of some of the more important functions of the organism, as for instance breathing, circulation of the blood, equilibrium and internal muscular accommodation." Art, then, indubitably originated in "a prehistoric man who was habitually a deep-breather, having no call to rearrange his natural habits when scratching lines on bones or in mud and taking pains to draw them regularly spaced."[5] Physical-Æsthetic researches were pursued in Germany by Helmholtz, Brücke and Stumpf,[6] who generally confined themselves to the narrower field of optics and acoustics, giving descriptions of the physical processes of artistic technique and the conditions to which pleasurable visual and auditive impressions must conform, without claiming to merge Æsthetic in Physics, but even pointing out the divergences between them. Degenerate Herbartians hastened to disguise in physiological terms the metaphysical forms and relations of which their master had spoken, and to coquet with the hedonism of the naturalists.

The superstitious cult of natural sciences was often accompanied (as is frequently the fate of superstition) by a sort of hypocrisy. Chemical, physical and physiological laboratories became Sybilline grottoes, resounding with the questions of credulous inquirers concerning the profoundest problems of the human spirit; and many of those who were really conducting their inquiries on inherently philosophic principles pretended or deluded themselves into believing that they followed the Method of Natural Science. A proof of this illusion or pretence is Hippolyte Taine's Philosophy of Art[7]

"If by studying the art of various peoples and various epochs," says Taine, "we could define the nature and establish the conditions of the existence of each art, we should have arrived at a complete explanation of the fine arts and of art in general, i.e. at what is called an Æsthetic." A historical Æsthetic, not a dogmatic, which fixes characters and indicates laws "like Botany, and studies with equal attention orange and ivy, pine and birch; indeed it is a sort of botanical science applied to the works of man instead of to plants"; an Æsthetic which shall follow "the general movement which tends daily more and more to join the moral to the natural sciences and by extending to the former the principles, the safeguards and the rules of the latter, enables both to attain the same security and maintain the same progress."[8] The naturalistic prelude is followed by definitions and doctrines indistinguishable from those offered by philosophers whose infallibility is not guaranteed by scientific methods, indeed, from those of the wildest of such philosophers. For, says Taine, art is imitation, an imitation so carried out as to render sensible the essential character of objects; the essential character being "a quality from which all other qualities, or many others, are derived and follow unalterably from it." The essential character of a lion, for example, is to be "a great carnivore"; this determines the formation of all its limbs; the essential character of Holland is to be "a country formed by alluvial soil." This is why art is not restricted to objects existing in reality, but is able, as in architecture or in music, to represent essential characters without natural objects to correspond.[9]

Now, in what do these essential characters, this carnivorosity and this alluviality differ, save perhaps in extravagance of example, from the "types" and "ideas" which intellectualiste or metaphysical Æsthetic had always considered as the proper content of art? Taine himself clears away every doubt in the matter by explicitly stating that "this character is what philosophers call the 'essence of things,' in virtue of which they affirm that the aim and end of art is to make manifest the essence of things"; he adds that, for his part, he "refuses to make use of the word 'essence' as being a technical term":[10] of the word itself, maybe; not of the concept for which it stands. There are two ways (says Taine, for all the world as though he were a Schelling) leading to the higher life of man, to contemplation: the way of science and the way of art: "the former investigates the causes and fundamental laws of reality, and expresses them in exact formulæ and abstract terms: the latter makes manifest these causes and laws, not in dry definitions inaccessible to the vulgar, and intelligible only to the select few, but in a sensible manner, appealing not merely to the reason but to the heart and senses of the most commonplace man; it has the power of being both elevated and popular, of manifesting what is most noble and elevated, and of manifesting it to every one."[11]

For Taine, as for the Hegelian æstheticians, works of art are arranged in a scale of values; so that, having begun by condemning as absurd every judgement of taste (every one to his taste[12]), he ends by asserting that "personal taste has no value whatever," and that some common measure should be abstracted and set up as a standard of progress and retrogression, ornamentation and degeneracy; a standard by which to approve and disapprove, praise and blame.[13] The scale of values set up by him is twofold or threefold, in the first instance it turns on the degree of importance of the character, i.e. the greater or less generality in idea, and the degree of beneficent effect (degré de bienfaisance), i.e. the greater or less moral value of the representation (two grades which are aspects of one single quality, viz. power, considered first for its own sake and then in its connexion with others): in the second instance upon the degree of convergence of effects, i.e. the fulness of expression, the harmony between idea and form.[14] This intellectualistic, moralistic, rhetorical doctrine is interrupted now and then by the usual naturalistic protests: "We shall, according to our custom, study this question in the manner of the natural scientist; that is to say methodically, by analysis; hoping to raise not merely a song of praise, but a code of laws," etc.;[15] as though that sufficed to alter the substance of the method adopted and the doctrine expounded. Taine finally gave himself over to dialectical treatments and solutions, and asserted that in the primitive period of Italian art, in the pictures of Giotto, we have soul without body (thesis); under the Renaissance, in Verrocchio's pictures, body without soul (antithesis); in the sixteenth century, in Raphæl, there is harmony of expression and anatomy, soul and body (synthesis).[16]

The same protests and similar methods are to be found in the works of Gustav Theodor Fechner. In his Introduction to Æsthetic (1876), Fechner claims to "abandon the attempt at conceptual determination of the objective essence of beauty," since he desires to compose not a metaphysical Æsthetic from above (von oben), but an inductive Æsthetic from below (von unten) and to achieve clearness, not sublimity; metaphysical Æsthetic should bear the same relation to inductive, as the Philosophy of Nature to Physics.[17] Proceeding on inductive lines, he discovers a long series of æsthetic laws or principles: the æsthetic threshold; assistance or increment; unity in variety; absence of contradictions; clarity; association; contrast; consequence; conciliation; the correct mean; economic use; persistency; change; measure; and so on without end. This chaos of concepts he expounds with a chapter apiece, pleased and proud to show himself so highly scientific and so wholly inconclusive.

Next he describes the experiments he can recommend to his readers. They are of this type. Take ten rectangular pieces of white cardboard of fairly equal area (say ten square inches), but with sides variously proportioned from a ratio of 1:1 to one of 2:5, including the ratio of the golden section, 21:34; mix all these together on a black table and collect persons of every kind and character, but all belonging to the educated classes, and applying the method of choice ask these people first to free their minds of all questions as to a particular use and then to pick out the pieces of cardboard which give them the highest sensation of pleasure and those which inspire them with the strongest feelings of disgust; the answers to be most carefully noted, keeping male and female subjects apart, and tabulated. Then see what follows. Fechner admits that the chosen cardboard-pickers often made reservations when questioned by himself, not knowing (very naturally) how to tell whether they liked a shape or disliked it without referring it to a definite use; sometimes they refused point-blank to make any selection at all; and they almost always seemed vague and perplexed in mind and generally, when submitted to a second test, answered in a way totally different from the first. Still, we all know that errors cancel out; and anyhow the tabulations showed that the highest sensations of delight were aroused not by the square, but by rectangular forms most nearly approaching the square, an enthusiastic rush being made for the proportion 21:34.[18] This method of selection received an extraordinarily felicitous definition; it was known as "an average of arbitrary judgements by an arbitrary number of persons arbitrarily selected."[19] Fechner also informs us (always in tabular form) of the result of a statistical inquiry of his own, by means of countless heaps of catalogues and gallery-guides, as to the dimensions and shapes of pictures in relation to the subjects they depict.[20]

Nevertheless, when he tries to tell us what beauty is, he falls back on using—whether well or ill—the old speculative method, which he prefaces with the remark that for him the concept of beauty is "merely an expedient in conformity with linguistic usage for indicating briefly the link which unites the prevailing conditions of immediate pleasure."[21] He distinguishes three meanings of the word "beauty": first, in a broad sense, the pleasing in general: secondly, in a narrow sense, a higher pleasure, but still sensuous: thirdly, in the narrowest sense, true beauty, which "not only pleases, but has the right of pleasing, possesses value in pleasing"; in it are united the concepts of beauty (the pleasing) and of goodness.[22] Beauty, in fact, is that which must please objectively and as such it corresponds with the good of action. "The Good," says Fechner, "is like a serious man, the capable organiser of his whole domestic life, sagaciously weighing the present and future, setting himself to extract the greatest benefit from both. Beauty is his florid spouse, careful of the present and mindful of her husband's wishes. The Pleasing is the baby, all senses and play: the Useful is the servant who puts his hands at his master's disposal and is given bread solely in accordance with his deserts. Truth, lastly, is the preacher and teacher to the household; preacher in matters of faith, teacher in those of learning: he gives an eye to the Good and a helping hand to the Useful, and holds up a looking-glass to Beauty."[23] When speaking of art, he sums up all essential laws or rules into the following: (1) art chooses a valuable or, at any rate, an interesting, idea for representation: (2) it expresses the idea in sensible material in the manner most suitable to its contents: (3) from amongst the various means at its disposal, it selects those which in themselves are more pleasing than the others: (4) the same procedure is observed in all particulars: (5) in the event of conflict between these rules, one is made to give way to another in such a way that the greatest possible pleasure and that of highest value is attained (das grösstmögliche und werthvollste Gefallen).[24] But why should Fechner, who had this eudemonistic theory of beauty and art (as he calls it) all ready made in advance,[25] take the trouble to enumerate principles and laws and conduct experiments and tabulate statistics wholly incapable of illustrating or proving it? One is tempted to believe that these pseudo-scientific operations were to him, and still are to his followers, a pastime or hobby neither more nor less important than playing Patience or collecting stamps.

Another example of the superstitious cult of the natural sciences is to be found in Professor Ernst Grosse's Origins of Art.[26] Contemner of all philosophical research into art, which he dismisses under the title of "Speculative Æsthetic," Grosse invokes a Science of art (Kunst wissenschaft) whose mission is to dig out all the laws lying hidden in the mass of historical facts collected to date. It is his opinion that all ethnographic and prehistoric material should be united to historical matter proper, there being no possibility, according to him, of framing general laws when study is restricted to the art of cultured peoples "just as a theory of generation must necessarily be imperfect if founded exclusively on the form of that function predominant among mammals."[27] But immediately after his declaration of abhorrence for philosophy, and of faith in scientific methods, Grosse finds himself in the same difficulty as Taine and Fechner. Indeed, there is no escape; in order to examine the artistic productions of primitive and savage peoples, a start must be made from some sort of concept of art. All the scientific metaphors, all the verbal emollients employed by Grosse cannot hide the nature of the plan he is forced to adopt, or its striking resemblance to the despised speculative Æsthetic. "As a traveller who desires to explore an unknown land must provide himself with a general outline of the country and have some knowledge of the direction in which his path should lie, if he does not wish to lose his way entirely; so we, before beginning our enquiry, need a general preliminary orientation concerning the essence of the phenomena (über das Wesen der Erscheinungen) about to engage our attention." Most certainly "we may count upon having an exact and exhaustive answer, at earliest, when our enquiry is finished; and it is not yet begun. That characteristic which we seek to determine at the outset ... may be most radically modified by the time we reach the end:" there is no question, fie on the suggestion! of imitating the old æstheticians: the only question is how "to give a definition which may serve as provisional scaffolding, to be broken away on completion of the edifice."[28] Words, words, words: the mite of general ideas and artistic laws to be found in his book has been quarried by Grosse not from study of the reports brought back by travellers in savage lands, but from speculation on the forms of the spirit; and (inevitably) his interpretation of the former is reached by the light thrown on it by the latter. In his final definition, Grosse concludes by considering art as an activity which in its development or as its result, possesses immediate feeling-value (Gefühlswerth), and is an end to itself; practical and æsthetic activity are in direct mutual opposition between which as a middle term lies the activity of play, which like the practical activity has its end outside itself, but, like the æsthetic, finds its enjoyment not in its external end, which is more or less insignificant, but in its own activity.[29] At the end of his book he remarks that the artistic activity of primitive peoples is hardly ever unaccompanied by the practical; and that art began by being social and became individual only in civilized times.[30]

The Æsthetics of Taine and Grosse have also been described by the epithet sociological.

But since no one knows what the science of Sociology is, we must deal with the sociological superstition as we dealt with the naturalistic; that is to say, by skipping the preface with its proposals that can never be carried out, and seeing what it is that the objective necessities of the case have forced the author to assert, and which of the possible alternative views he accepts, or between what selection of them his allegiance wavers. During this examination we shall ignore the fairly common case of an author who while pretending to construct an Æsthetic simply compiles a list of facts connected with the history of art or civilization.

Some social reformers of our day, like Proudhon, have revived the condemnations of Plato, or the mitigated moralism of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Proudhon denied the formula Art for Art's sake; he looked on art as a mere purveyor of sensuous pleasure, something which must be subordinated to legal and economical ends; poetry, sculpture, painting, music, romance, history, comedy, tragedy had for him no aim save exhortation to virtue and dissuasion from vice.[31]

Development of social sympathy is the whole duty of art in the estimation of J. M. Guyau, who became famous as the founder of Social Æsthetic and was, according to certain French critics, inaugurator of the third epoch in the history of Æsthetic, the first being the æsthetic of the ideal (Plato), the second that of perception (Kant), and the third that of "Social Sympathy" (Guyau). In his Problems of Contemporary Æsthetic (1884) Guyau combats the theory of play, and substitutes that of Life; in a posthumous publication Art in Its Sociological Aspect (1889) he explains more clearly that the life of which he speaks is social life.[32] If the beautiful be the intellectually pleasing, certainly it cannot be identified with the useful which is only searching for what is pleasing; but the useful (says Guyau, in the belief that he is correcting both Kant and the evolutionists) does not always exclude the beautiful, of which indeed it often forms the lowest degree. The study of art is embraced partly,[33] not wholly, by Sociology: for art fulfils two ends, firstly and primarily that of provoking pleasant sensations (of colour, sound, etc.) and in this sense finds itself in the presence of practically incontestable scientific laws which connect Æsthetic with the physics (optics, acoustics, etc.), mathematics, physiology and psychophysics. Sculpture, in fact, rests especially on anatomy and physiology: painting on anatomy, physiology and optics: architecture on optics (golden section, etc.): music on physiology and acoustics: poetry on metrics, whose most general laws are acoustical and physiological. The second function of art is to produce the phenomena of "psychological induction," which bring to a head ideas and sentiments of most complex nature (sympathy with personages represented, interest, pity, indignation, etc.), in short all the social feelings, which constitute it "the expression of life." Whence are derived the two tendencies recognised in art; one inclining towards harmony, consonance, and everything delightful to ear and eye: the other towards the transfusion of life into the domain of art. Genius, true genius is destined to preserve the balance of the two tendencies: decadents and degenerates deprive art of its social sympathetic aim by setting æsthetic sympathy at war against human sympathy.[34] Translating all this into familiar terms, we may say that Guy au asserts one purely hedonistic art, above which he superimposes another art, also hedonistic, but serviceable to the cause of morality.

The same polemic against decadents, degenerates and individualists is carried on by another writer, Max Nordau, who gives art the task of re-establishing the wholeness of life amongst the fragmentary specialisation characteristic of industrial society; he asserts that art for art's sake, art as the simple expression of internal states or the objectification of the artist's feelings, no doubt exists, but is merely "the art of Quaternary man, the art of the cave-dweller."[35]

Naturalistic is the best term with which to qualify the Æsthetic derived from that identification of genius with degeneracy which made the fortune of Lombroso and his school. This identification derives its chief strength from the following piece of reasoning. Great mental efforts, total absorption in one dominating thought, often bring about physiological disorders in the bodily organism and weakness or atrophy of various vital functions. But such derangements come under the head of the pathological concept of illness, degeneration, madness. Therefore genius is identical with illness, degeneration and madness. A syllogism from particular to general, in which case, according to traditional Logic, non est consequentia. But with sociologists such as Nordau, Lombroso and company, we almost overstep the line separating respectable error from that grosser form which we call a blunder.

A mere confusion between scientific analysis and historical inquiry or description is visible in the works of certain sociologists and anthropologists. Thus one of them, Carl Bücher, in studying the life of primitive peoples, asserts that poetry, music and work were originally fused in one single act; that poetry and music were used to regulate the rhythms of labour.[36] This may be historically true or false, important or no: it has nothing whatever to do with æsthetic science. In the same way Andrew Lang maintains that the doctrine concerning the origin of art as disinterested expression of the mimetic faculty finds no confirmation from what we know of primitive art, which is decorative rather than expressive:[37] as though primitive art, which is a mere fact awaiting interpretation, could ever be converted into a criterion for the interpretation of art in general.

The same vague naturalism exercised a baneful influence on Linguistic, which of late years has been wholly lacking in such profound research as that inaugurated by Humboldt and followed up by Steinthal. But Steinthal never succeeded in founding a school. Max Müller, popular and inaccurate, maintained the indivisibility of speech and thought, confounding, or at least not distinguishing, æsthetic and logical thought; although at one time he had noted that the formation of names had a closer connexion with wit, in the sense of Locke, than with judgement. He maintained, moreover, that the science of language is not a historical but a natural science, because language is not the invention of man: the dilemma of "historical" and "natural" was canvassed and resolved over and over again with little result.[38] Another philologist, Whitney, attacked the "miraculous" theory of Müller and denied that thought is indivisible from speech: "The deaf-mute does not speak, but he can think," he observes; "thought is not function of the acoustic nerve." By this means Whitney relapsed into the ancient doctrine that speech is a symbol or means of expression, of human thought, subject to the will, the result of a synthesis of faculties and of a capacity for intelligent adaptation of means to end.[39]

Philosophical spirit reappeared in Paul's Principles of the History of Language (1880),[40] though the author's efforts to defend himself from the terrifying accusation of being a philosopher led him to hunt out a fresh title to replace the scandalous "Philosophy of Language." But if Paul is vague about the relation of Logic to Grammar, he must be given every credit for identifying, as Humboldt had already done, the question of the origin of language with that of its nature; and reasserting that language is created afresh whenever we speak. He must also be given credit for having conclusively criticized the Ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie) of Steinthal and Lazarus, showing that there is no such thing as collective psyche and that there can be no language other than of the individual.

Wundt[41] on the other hand attached the study of language, mythology and customs to this non-existent science of Ethnopsychology; in his latest work, on this very subject of language,[42] he foolishly echoes Whitney's gibes and denounces as a "miracle theory" (Wundertheorie) that glorious doctrine inaugurated by Herder and Humboldt, whom he accuses of "mystical obscurity" (mystiche Dunkel): he observes that this view may have had some justification before the principle of evolution had reached its triumphant application to organic nature in general and to man in particular. He has not the faintest notion of the function of imagination, or of the true relation between thought and expression; he finds no substantial difference between expression in the naturalistic, and expression in the spiritual and linguistic sense; he considers language as a special highly developed form of the vital psychophysical manifestations and of the expressive movements of animals. Out of these facts language is developed by imperceptible gradations; so that, beyond the general concept of expressive movement (Ausdrucksbewegung) "there is no specific mark by which language can be distinguished in any but an arbitrary manner."[43] The philosophy of Wundt betrays its own weakness by showing its inability to master the problem of language and art. In his Ethics æsthetic facts are presented as a complex of logical and ethical elements; the existence of æsthetic as a special normative science is denied, not for the good and sufficient reason that there are no such things as "normative sciences," but because this special science is said by him to be absorbed by the two sciences of Logic and Ethics,[44] which amounts to denying the existence of Æsthetic and the originality of art.