to be taken up again and again (like the novel).1 Without The kinds in these highly philosophical trivialities the divisions of the schools. kinds still wander through the books called Institutions of Literature, written by philologists and men of letters, and the ordinary school-books of Italy, France and Germany; and psychologists and philosophers still persist in writing about the Esthetic of the tragic, of the comic and of the humorous.2 The objectivity of literary kinds is frankly maintained by Ferdinand Brunetière, who looks on literary history as "the evolution of kinds," and gives sharply defined form to a superstition which, seldom confessed so truthfully or applied so rigorously, survives to contaminate modern literary history.4 III THE THEORY OF THE LIMITS OF THE ARTS To Lessing must be ascribed the merit and the sole glory of having discovered that every art has its special character and inviolable limits. But his merit lies not in his own theory, which, in itself, is scarcely tenable,5 but in having, though by an error, aroused discussion of a highly important æsthetical point till then wholly overlooked. After some slight notice from Du Bos and Batteux, some preparation of the field by Diderot ® and Mendelssohn, and long disquisitions by Meier and other Wolffians upon natural and conventional symbols, Lessing 1 Philosophie d. Schönen, ch. 2, § 2. 2 See, e.g., Volkelt, Asth. d. Tragischen, Munich, 1897; Lipps, Der Streit über Tragödie, etc. 3 See his other works, L'Évolution des genres dans l'histoire de la littérature, Paris, 1890 seqq., and Manuel de l'hist. de la litter. française, ibid., 1898. 4 Croce, Per la storia della critica e storiografia letter. pp. 23-25. 5 See above, pp. 113-115. D. Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, 1749; Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 1751; Essai sur la peinture, 1765. 7 M. Mendelssohn, Briefe über Empfind., 1755; Betrachtungen, cit., 1757. J. Chr. Wolff, Psychol. empirica, §§ 272-312; Meier, Anfangsgründe, §§ 513-528, 708-735; Betrachtungen, § 126. The limits of the arts in Lessing. and arts of time. was the first to raise clearly the question of the value attaching to the distinction between the various arts. Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had enumerated the arts according to denominations of current phraseology, and had composed numbers of technical hand-books distinguishing major and minor arts; but in Aristoxenus or Vitruvius, Marchetto da Padova or Cennino Cennini, Leonardo da Vinci or Leon Battista Alberti, Palladio or Scamozzi, it would be vain to look for the problem proposed by Lessing, for the spirit of these technical treatise-writers is entirely different. Some rudi ments of the question may be detected in the comparisons made, and the questions of precedence raised, between poetry and painting or painting and sculpture, to be found now and then in stray paragraphs of their books (Leonardo da Vinci pressed the claims of painting, Michael Angelo those of sculpture): the theme eventually became a favourite one for academic discussion, and was not despised by Galileo himself.1 Lessing was induced to raise the question in the attempt to controvert the strange views of Spence concerning Arts of space the close union between painting and poetry among the ancients, and of Count Caylus, who held that the excellence of a poem must be judged by the number of subjects it offers to the brush of the painter. He was further instigated by the comparisons between poetry and painting upon which were commonly founded the most ridiculous rules for tragedy: the maxim Ut pictura poësis, whose original motive was to emphasize the representative or imaginative character of poetry, and the community of nature among the arts, had been converted by superficial interpretation into a defence of the most vicious intellectualistic and realistic prejudices. Lessing argued in this wise: "If painting in its imitations employs precisely a medium or symbol different from that of poetry (the former employing spatial forms and colours, the latter temporal articulated sounds), since the symbol must certainly be in close relation with that 1 Letter to Lodovico Cardi da Cigoli, June 26, 1612. which is signified, coexistent symbols can only express coexistent objects or parts of objects, and consecutive symbols can only express consecutive objects or parts of objects. Objects mutually coexistent, or having mutually coexistent parts, are called bodies. Bodies, then, through their quality of visibility, are the true objects of painting. Objects successively consecutive amongst themselves, or whose parts are consecutive, are called in general actions. Actions, then, are the suitable objects of poetry." Painting, undoubtedly, may represent action, but only by means of bodies which indicate it; and poetry may represent bodies, but only by indicating them by means of actions. When a poet using language, i.e. arbitrary symbols, sets himself to describe bodies, he is no longer a poet but a prose-writer, since a true poet only describes bodies by the effect they produce on the soul.1 Retouching and developing this distinction, Lessing described action or movement in a picture as an addition made by the imagination of the beholder; so true is this, says he, that animals perceive nothing save immobility in a picture. He further studied the various unions of arbitrary with natural symbols, such as that of poetry with music (in which the former is subordinate to the latter), of music with dancing, of poetry with dancing, and of music and poetry with dancing (union of arbitrary consecutive audible symbols with natural visible symbols) of the pantomime of antiquity (union of arbitrary consecutive visible symbols with natural consecutive visible symbols) of the language of the dumb (the only art that employs arbitrary consecutive visible symbols): and, lastly, of imperfect unions, such as that of painting with poetry. If not every use to which language is put is poetic, Lessing holds that not every use of natural coexistent signs is pictorial painting, like language, has its prose. Prosaic painters are those who represent consecutive objects notwithstanding the character of coexistence in their signs, allegorical painters those who make arbitrary use of natural signs, and those who pretend to represent the invisible or 1 Laokoon, §§ 16-20. Limits and of the arts in later philosophy. Herder and the audible by means of the visible. Desirous of preserving the naturalness of symbolism, Lessing ended by condemning the custom of painting objects on a diminished scale, and concludes: "I think that the aim of an art should be that only to which it is specially adapted, not that which can be performed equally well by other arts. I find in Plutarch a comparison which illustrates this admirably he who would split wood with a key and open the door with an axe not only spoils both utensils but deprives himself of the unity of each alike.” 1 The principle of limitations or of the specific character classifications of individual arts, as laid down by Lessing, occupied the attention of philosophers in later days, who, without discussing the principle itself, employed it in classifying the arts and arranging them in series. Herder here and there continued Lessing's examination in his fragment on Plastic (1769); 2 Heydenreich wrote a treatise (1790) on the limits of the six arts (music, dance, figurative arts, gardening, poetry and representative art), and criticized the clavecin oculaire of Father Castel, a contrivance for the combination of colours which should act in the same way as the series of musical notes in harmony and melody;3 Kant appealed to the analogy of a speaking man, and classified the arts according to speech, gesture and tone as arts of speech, figurative arts, and arts producing a mere play of sensations (mimicry and colouring). Schelling differentiated the artistic identity according as it consisted in the infusion of the infinite into the finite, or of the finite into the infinite (ideal art or real art) into poetry and art proper. Under the heading of real arts he included the figurative arts, music, painting, plastic (which comprehended architecture, bas-relief and sculpture): in the ideal series were the three corresponding forms of poetry, lyrical, epical and dramatic. With a similar 1 Laokoon, appendix, § 43. Schelling. Solger. 2 Plastik, einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildenden Traume, 1778 (Select Works of Herder in the collection Deutsche Nationlitteratur, vol. 76, part iii. § 2). 3 System der Asthetik, pp. 154-236. 5 Phil. d. Kunst, pp. 370-371. method, Solger placed poetry, the universal art, side by side with art strictly so called, which is either symbolical (sculpture) or allegorical (painting), and, in either case, is a union of concepts and bodies: if you take corporality without concept, you have architecture; if concept without matter, music.1 Hegel makes poetry the bond of union between the two extremes of figurative art and of music. We have already seen how Schopenhauer de- Schopenhauer. stroyed the accepted limitations of art and built them up again, following the order of the ideas which they represent.3 Herbart clung to Lessing's two groups, Herbart. simultaneous arts and successive arts, and defined the former as "permitting themselves to be inspected from every side," the latter as "rejecting complete investigation and remaining in semi-darkness" in the first group he placed architecture, plastic, church music and classical poetry; in the second ornamental gardening, painting, secular music and romantic poetry. Herbart was implacable against those who look in one art for the perfections of another; who "look on music as a sort of painting, painting as poetry, poetry as an elevated plastic and plastic as a species of æsthetic philosophy," 5 while admitting that a concrete work of art, such as a picture, may contain elements of the picturesque, the poetic and other kinds, held together by the skill of the artist." Weisse divided the arts into three triads, intended to Weisse. recall the nine Muses.' Zeising invented a cross-division Zeising. into figurative arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), musical arts (instrumental music, song, poetry), and arts of mimicry (dance, musical mimicry, representative art), and into macrocosmic arts (architecture, instrumental music, dance), microcosmic arts (sculpture, song, musical mimicry) and historical arts (painting, poetry and representative art). Vischer classified them according to Vischer. 1 Vorles. üb. Asth. pp. 257-262. 3 See above, pp. 305-306. 2 Op. cit. ii. p. 222. • Einleitung, § 115, PP. 170-171. 5 Schriften z. prakt. Phil. in Werke, viii. p. 2. • Einleitung, § 110, pp. 164-165. 7 Cf. Hartmann, Dtsche. Asth. s. Kant, pp. 539-540. 8 Asth. Forsch. PP. 547-549. |