Arteaga, one of the many Jesuit refugees in Italy, wrote a treatise on Ideal Beauty (1789); 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.2

characteristic.

The first voice of dissent from this doctrine of ideal G. Spalletti beauty was raised in 1764 by a small circle of Italians and the 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.3 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, 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

man

1 Investigaciones filosóficas sobre la belleza ideal, considerada como objeto de todas las artes de imitación, Madrid, 1789.

2 Ricerche su le bellezze della pittura (Ital. trans., Parma, 1804); cf. D'Azara, Vita del Mengs, in Opere, i. p. 27.

Saggio sopra la bellezza, dated "Grottaferrata, July 14, 1764," and published at Rome, 1765, anonymously.

Beauty and the

characteristic: Hirt, Meyer, Goethe.

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."1 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.

"2

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, light, shade and chiaroscuro are distinguished and represented in the manner demanded by the object.' 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 character

1 Saggio, esp. §§ 3, 12, 15, 17, 19, 34.

2 Über das Kunstschöne, in the review Die Horen, 1797; cf. Hegel, Vorles. ü. Asth. i. p. 24; and Zimmermann, Gesch. d. Asth. pp. 356-357

istic 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."1

1 Goethe, Der Sammler und die Seinigen (in Werke, ed. Goedeke, vol. xxx.).

1. Kant.

Kant and
Vico.

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 Esthetic 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 Esthetic 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 Esthetic or solved it or brought it within

1 B. Spaventa, Prolus. ed introd. alle lezioni di filosofia, Naples, 1862 pp. 83-102; Scritti filosofici, ed. Gentile, pp. 139-145, 303-307.

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 Identity of the our reply may seem to those who recollect the explicit cant and concept of art and insistent war waged by him against the school of Baumgarten. 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.1 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 Esthetic (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 Esthetic, since the rules of one apply to the other and each throws light upon the other." In his Kant's University lectures he distinguished æsthetic truth from "Lectures." 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. It is æsthetically true (said he) that a man once dead cannot come to life again, although this is

2

1 Kritik d. rein. Vernunft (ed. Kirchmann), i. 1, § 1, note.

2 See above, p. 244.

T