lectures on Esthetic attracted huge throngs and were one of the regular sights in the noisy, crowded Neapolitan university. Tari divided his treatment under three heads, Esthesinomy, Esthesigraphy and Esthesipraxis, corresponding to the Metaphysic of the beautiful, to the doctrine of beauty in nature, and to that of beauty in art ; like the German idealists, he defined the æsthetic sphere as intermediate between the theoretical and practical : he says emphatically that "in the world of spirit the temperate zone is equidistant from the glacial, peopled by the Esquimaux of thought, and from the torrid, peopled by the giants of action." He pulled Beauty from her throne, substituting in her stead the Esthetic, of which Beauty is but an initial moment, the simple "beginning of æsthetic life, eternal mortality, flower and fruit in one," whose successive moments are represented by the Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous, and the Dramatic. But the most attractive part of Tari's lectures was Esthesigraphy. that devoted to Esthesigraphy, subdivided into Cosmography, Physiography and Psychography, in the course of which he frequently quoted Vischer with great devotion; "the great Vischer" as he called him, in imitation of whom he constructed his own "æsthetic physics," brightening it with much varied erudition and enlivening it with quaint comparisons. Is he speaking of beauty in inorganic nature-water, for example? He says in his fanciful manner, "When water ripples in the sunshine, in that act it has its smile; it has its frown in the breaking wave, its caprice in the fountain, its majestic fury in the foam." Is he speaking of geological configuration? "The vale, cradle perchance of the human race, is idyllic ; the plain, monotonous but fat, is didactic." Of metals? Gold is born great; iron, the apotheosis of human toil, achieves greatness; the former boasts of its cradle when it does not bring it to dishonour; the latter causes it to be forgotten." He looked on vegetable life as a dream, repeating Herder's fine saying that the plant is "the new-born babe that hangs sucking upon the breast of mother nature." He divided vegetables into three types : foliaceous, ramified and umbelliferous: "the foliaceous type," he says, "attains gigantic proportions in the tropics, where the queen of monocotyledons, the Palm-tree, represents despotism, the human scourge of those desert regions. Of that solitary pinnacle, all crown, the negro may well be identified as the reptile that crawls round its base." Amongst flowers, the carnation is "symbol of betrayal, by reason of the variegation of its colours and its deeply-dissected petals"; the celebrated comparison by Ariosto of a rose with a young girl is permissible only when the flower is still in bud, because "when it has unfolded its petals, disdaining the protection of thorns, displaying itself in all the pomp of its full colour, and boldly asking to be plucked by any hand, then it is woman, all woman, to call it by no harsher name, giving pleasure without feeling it, simulating love by its perfume and modesty by the crimson of its petals.' He searches for and comments upon analogies between certain fruits and certain flowers; between the strawberry, for instance, and the violet; between the orange and the rose; he admired "the luxuriant spirals and the delicate architecture of a bunch of grapes": the mandarin-orange reminded him of the nobleman qui s'est donné la peine de naître; the fig, on the contrary, was the great country bumpkin, "rough, rude, but profitable." In the animal kingdom, the spider symbolized primitive isolation; the bee, monasticism; the ant, republicanism. He noted, with Michelet, that the spider is a living paralogism; it cannot feed itself without its web, and it cannot spin its web without feeding. Fish he condemns as unæsthetic : they are of stupid appearance with their wide-open eyes and incessant gaping, which makes them look voraciously gluttonous.” Not so with amphibians, for which he entertains a sympathy: the frog and the crocodile, "alpha and omega of the family, start from the comical, or even the scurrilous, and attain the sublimity of the horrid." Birds are especially æsthetic by nature, "possessing the three most genial attributes of a living being: love, song, and flight"; moreover, they present contrasts and antitheses: "opposite to the eagle, queen of the skies, stands the swan, the mild king of the marshes; the libertine vainglorious cock has its contrast in the humble uxorious turtle-dove; the magnificent peacock is balanced by the rude and rustic turkey." Amongst mammals, nature compensates for defects of pure beauty by dramatic value; if they cannot throw their song into the air, they have the rudiments of speech; if they have no variegated, myriad-hued plumage, they have dark, heavily-marked colouring, instinct with life; if they cannot fly, they have many other modes of powerful progression; and, the higher they go, the more do they attain individuality in appearance and life. "The epic of animal life is comedy in the donkey, iniquae mentis asellus; idyl in the great wild beasts; downright tragedy in the Kaffir bull, that cloven-hoofed Codrus, who gives himself voluntarily to the lion in order to save the herd." As amongst birds, so amongst beasts attractive contrasts are to be made :—the lamb and the kid seem to typify Jesus and the devil; dog and cat, abnegation and egoism; hare and fox, the foolish simpleton and crafty villain. Many quaint and subtle observations does Tari let fall on human beauty and the relative beauty of the sexes, allowing the female to have charm, not beauty: "bodily beauty is poise, and woman's body is so ill-poised that she falls easily when running; made for child-bearing, she has knock-kneed legs, adapted to support the large pelvis ; her shoulders have a curve compensating the convexity of the chest." He describes the various parts of the body: "curly hair expresses physical force; straight hair, moral"; "blue, napoleonic eyes have sometimes a depth like the sea; green eyes have a melancholy fascination; grey eyes are wanting in individuality; black eyes are the most intensely individual"; a lovely mouth has been best described by Heine; two lips evenly matched; to lovers the mouth will rather seem a shell whose pearl is the kiss." "1 1 A. Tari, Lezioni di estetica generale, collected by C. ScamacciaLuvarà, Naples, 1884; Elementi di estetica, compiled by G. Tommasuolo, Naples, 1885. How could we better take a smiling leave of metaphysical Æsthetic in the German manner than by recording this quaint vernacular version of it made by Tari, that kindly little old man, "the last jovial high-priest of an arbitrary and confused Esthetic " ? 1 1 V. Pica, L'Arte dell' Estremo Oriente, Turin, 1894, p. 13. Positivism and Evolutionism. Esthetic of 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. Spencer (the greatest positivist of his day), whilst discussing Esthetic, 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 Esthetic 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 |