in Greek by the word λEKтóv, and by the words effatum or dicibile in Latin. But we are not sure what they really meant, and whether that vague concept were intended by them to distinguish the linguistic representation from the abstract concept (which would bring them into touch with the modern view), or the meaning of sound in general.1 We cannot collect any other germ of truth from the ancient writers. A philosophical Grammar, like a philosophical Poetics, remained unattainable in antiquity. 1 Steinthal, Gesch. d. Sprachw., 2nd ed., i. pp. 288, 293, 296-297. II ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE Mysticism. ALMOST all the developments of ancient Esthetic were Middle Ages. continued by tradition or reappeared by spontaneous Ideas on the generation in the course of the Middle Ages. Neo- beautiful. Platonic mysticism continued, entrusted to the care of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (De coelesti hierarchia, De ecclesiastica hierarchia, De divinis nominibus, etc.), to the translations of these works made by John Scotus Eriugena, and to the divulgations of the Spanish Jews (Avicebron). The Christian God took the place of the Summum Bonum or Idea: God, wisdom, goodness, supreme beauty, source of beautiful things in nature, which are a ladder to the contemplation of the Creator. But these speculations continued to recede further and further from the consideration of art, with which Plotinus had connected them; and the empty definitions of the beautiful by Cicero and other ancient writers were often repeated. Saint Augustine defined beauty in general as unity (omnis pulchritudinis forma unitas est), and that of the body as congruentia partium cum quadam coloris suavitate, and the old distinction between something that is beautiful in itself and relative beauty reappeared in a book of his, which has been lost, entitled De pulchro et apto; the very name shows that he reasserted the old distinction between the beautiful in itself and the relatively beautiful, quoniam apte accommodaretur alicui. Elsewhere he notes that an image is called beautiful si perfecte implet illud cujus imago est, et coaequatur ei.1 1 Confess. IV. x. ch. 13; De Trinitate, vi. ch. 10; Epist. 3, 18; De The peda gogic theory of art in the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas varied but little from him in positing three requisites for beauty: integrity or perfection, due proportion, and clearness; following Aristotle, he distinguished the beautiful from the good, defining the first as that which pleases in the mere contemplation of it (pulcrum . . . id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet); he referred to the beauty that even base things possess if well imitated, and applied the doctrine of imitation to the beauty of the Second Person of the Trinity (in quantum est imago expressa Patris).1 If it were wished to discover references to the hedonistic conception of art, it would be possible to do this, with a little goodwill, in some of the sayings of jongleurs and troubadours. Esthetic rigorism, the total negation of art for religion or for divine and human science, shows itself in Tertullian and among certain Fathers of the Church, at the entrance to the Middle Ages; at their conclusion, in a certain crude scholastic spirit, for example in Cecco d' Ascoli, who proclaimed against Dante: "I leave trifles behind me and return to the true; fables are always unpleasing to me," and later, in the reactionary Savonarola. But the narcotic theory of pedagogic or moralistic art prevailed over every other. It had contributed to send to sleep the æsthetic doubts and inquiries of the ancients, and was well suited to a period of relative decadence of culture. This was all the more the case, seeing that it accorded well with the moral and religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and afforded a justification not only for the new art of Christian inspiration, but also for the surviving works of classical and pagan art. The allegorical interpretation was again a means of salvation for these last. The De continentia Virgiliana of Fulgentius (sixth century) is a curious monument to this fact. This work made Virgil compatible with the Middle Ages and opened his way to that great reputation civitate Dei, xxii. ch. 19 (in Opera, ed. dei Maurini, Paris, 1679–1690, vols. i. ii. vii. viii.). 1 Summa theol. I. I. xxxix. 8; I. 11. xxvii. 1 (ed. Migne, i. cols. 794795; ii. col. 219). which he was destined to attain, as the "gentle sage who knew all things." Even John of Salisbury says of the Roman poet, that "sub imagine fabularum totius philosophiae exprimit veritatem." 1 The process of interpretation became fixed in the doctrine of the four meanings, literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic, which Dante afterwards transferred to vernacular poetry. It would be easy to accumulate quotations from mediæval writers, repeating in all keys the theory that art inculcates the truths of morality and of faith and constrains hearts to Christian piety, beginning with those well-known verses of Theodulf: “In quorum dictis (that is to say, in the utterances of the poets) quamquam sint frivola multa, Plurima sub falso tegmine vera latent," and so on, until we reach the doctrines and opinions of our own great men, Dante and Boccaccio. For Dante, poetry nihil aliud est quam fictio rhethorica in musicaque posita." 2 The poet should have a “reasoning" in his verses “under a cloak of figure or of rhetorical colour"; and it would be a shameful thing for him, if, "when asked, he were not able to divest his words of such a garment, in such a way as to show that they possessed a true meaning." 3 Readers sometimes stop at the external vesture alone, and this indeed suffices for those who, like the vulgar, do not succeed in penetrating the hidden meaning. Poetry will say to the vulgar, which does not understand "its argument," what a song of Dante's says at its conclusion, At least behold how beautiful I am": if you are not able to obtain instruction from me, at least enjoy me as a pleasing thing. Many, indeed, "their beauty more than their goodness will delight," in poems, unless they are assisted by commentaries in the nature of the Convivio, a light which will allow every shade of meaning to reach them." 4 Poetry was the " gay science," un fingimiento" (as the Spanish poet the Marquis of Santillana wrote) "de cosas útiles, cubiertas ó veladas con 1 Comparetti, Virg. nel medio evo, vol. i. passim. 2 De vulg. eloq. (ed. Rajna), bk. ii. ch. 4. Vita nuova, ch. 25. 4 Convivio, i. I. N Hints of an muy fermosa cobertura, compuestas, distinguidas é scandidas, por cierto cuento, pesso é medida.” 1 It would not then be correct to say that the Middle Ages simply identified art with theology and with philosophy. Indeed it sharply distinguished the one from the other, defining art and poetry, like Dante, with the words fictio rhethorica, "figure" and "rhetorical colour," "cloak," "beauty," or like Santillana with those of fingimiento or fermosa cobertura. This pleasing falsity was justified from the practical point of view, very much in the same way as sexual union and love were justified and sanctified in matrimony. This did not exclude, indeed it implied, that the perfect state was certainly celibacy— that is to say, pure science, free from admixture of art. The only tendency that had no true and proper rein scholastic presentatives was the sound scientific tendency. The philosophy. Poetics of Aristotle itself was hardly known or rather it was ill-known, from the Latin translation that a German of the name of Hermann made, not earlier than 1256, of the paraphrase or commentary of Averroes. Perhaps the best of the mediæval investigations into language is that supplied by Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, where the word is, however, still looked upon as a sign ("rationale signum et sensuale . . . natura sensuale quidem, in quantum sonus est, rationale vero in quantum aliquid significare videtur ad placitum "). The study of the expressive, æsthetic, linguistic faculty would, however, have found an appropriate occasion and a point of departure in the secular debate between nominalism and realism, which could not avoid touching to some extent the relations between the word and the flesh, thought and language. Duns Scotus wrote a treatise De modis significandi seu (the addition is due perhaps to the editors) grammatica speculativa.3 Abelard had defined sensation as confusa conceptio, and imaginatio as a faculty that preserved 1 Prohemio al Condestable de Portugal, 1445-1449 (in Obras, ed. Amador de los Rios, 1852), § 3. 2 De vulg. eloq. bk. i. ch. 3. Lately reprinted under the editorship of padre M. Fernandez Garcia, Ad claras Aquas (Quarracchi), 1902. |