IV OTHER PARTICULAR DOCTRINES Natural I. Schleiermacher also rejected the concept of Natural The esthetic Beauty, giving Hegel greater praise than he deserved in theory of the matter, because Hegel's denial of this concept was, Beauty. as we have seen, more verbal than real. At all events, Schleiermacher's radical denial of the existence of a natural beauty external to and independent of the human mind marked a victory over a serious error, and appears to us imperfect and one-sided only so far as it seems to exclude those æsthetic facts of imagination which are attached to objects given in nature.1 Important contributions towards the correction of this imperfect and onesided element were supplied by the historical and psychological study of the "feeling for nature," promoted successfully by Alexander Humboldt in his dissertation to be found in the second volume of Cosmos,2 and continued by Laprade, Biese, and others in our own time.3 In his criticism of his own Ästhetik, Vischer completes the passage from the metaphysical construction of beauty in nature to the psychological interpretation of it, and recognizes the necessity of suppressing the section devoted to Natural Beauty in his first æsthetic system, and incorporating it with the doctrine of imagination: he says that such treatments do not belong to æsthetic science, being a medley of zoology, sentiment, fantasy and humour, worthy of development in monographs in the style of the poet G. G. Fischer's on the life of birds, or Bratranek's on the æsthetic of the vegetable world." Hartmann, as heir of the old metaphysics, reproaches 1 See above, pp. 98-99. 2 Das Naturgefühl nach Verschiedenheit der Zeiten und Volksstämme, in Cosmos, ii. 3 V. Laprade, Le Sentiment de la nature avant le christianisme, 1866; also chez les modernes, 1867; Alfred Biese, Die Entwicklung des Naturgefühls bei den Griechen und Römern, Kiel, 1882-1884; Die Entwicklung des Naturgefühls im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit, 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1892. 4 Kritische Gänge, v. pp. 5-23. The theory of asthetic senses. Vischer for this exclusion, and maintains that, in addition to the beauty of imagination introduced by man into natural things (hineingelegte Schönheit), there exist a formal and a substantial beauty in nature, coinciding with realisation of the immanent ends or ideas of nature.1 But the way chosen ultimately by Vischer is the only one by which Schleiermacher's thesis can be successfully developed so as to show the precise meaning which may be given to the assertion of (æsthetic) beauty in nature. II. That æsthetic senses or superior senses exist and that beauty attaches to certain senses only, not to all, is a very old opinion. We have seen already 2 that Socrates, in the Hippias maior, mentions the doctrine of beauty as that which pleases hearing and sight” (τὸ καλὸν ἐστὶ τὸ δι ̓ ἀκοῆς τε καὶ ὄψεως ἡδύ) : and he adds, it seems impossible to deny that we take pleasure in looking at handsome men and fine ornaments, pictures and statues with our eyes, and hearing beautiful songs or beautiful voices, music, speeches and conversations with our ears. Nevertheless Socrates himself in the same dialogue confutes this theory by perfectly valid arguments, amongst which is that, besides the difficulty arising from the fact that beautiful things may be found outside the range of the sensible impressions of eye and ear, there is no reason for creating a special class for the pleasure arising from impressions on these two senses, to the exclusion of others. He also states the more subtle and philosophical objection that that which is pleasing to the sight is not so to the hearing, and vice versa; whence it follows that the ground of beauty must not be sought in visibility or audibility, but in something differing from either and common to both.3 The problem was never again, perhaps, attacked with such acumen and seriousness as in this ancient dialogue. In the eighteenth century Home remarked that beauty depended on sight, and that impressions received by the other senses might be agreeable but were not beautiful, 1 Dtsche. Asth. s. Kant, pp. 217-218; cf. Philos. d. Schönen, bk. ii. ch. 7. 2 See above, pp. 164-165. 3 Hippias maior, passim. and distinguished sight and hearing as superior to those of touch, taste and smell, the latter being merely bodily in nature and without the spiritual refinement of the other two. He held these to produce pleasures superior to organic pleasures though inferior to intellectual; decorous pleasures, that is to say; elevated, sweet, moderately exhilarating; as far removed from the turbulence of the passions as from the languor of indolence, and intended to refresh and soothe the spirit. Following suggestions of Diderot, Rousseau and Berkeley, Herder drew attention to the importance of the sense of touch (Gefühl) in plastic art of this "third sense, which perhaps deserves to be investigated first of all, and is unjustly relegated to a place amongst the grosser senses." Certainly" touch knows nothing of surface or colour," but "sight, for its part, knows nothing of forms and configurations." Thus "touch cannot be so gross a sense as it is reputed, if it is the very organ by which we sensate all other bodies, and rules over a vast kingdom of subtle and complex concepts. As the surface stands to the body, so does sight stand in respect of touch, and it is merely a colloquial abbreviation to speak of seeing bodies as surfaces and to suppose that we see with our eyes that which we have gradually learnt in infancy simply by the sense of touch." Every beauty of form or corporeity is a concept not visible, but palpable. From the triad of æsthetic senses thus established by Herder (sight for painting; hearing for music; touch for sculpture), Hegel returned to the customary dyad, saying that "the sensory part of art has reference only to the two theoretic senses of sight and hearing "; that smell, taste and touch must be excluded from artistic pleasures, since they are connected with matter as such and the immediate sensible quality it may possess (smell with material volatilization; taste with material solution of objects; and touch with hot, cold, smooth and so forth); and that hence they can 1 Elements of Criticism, introd., and cf. ch. 3. 2 Herder, Kritische Wälder (in Werke, ed. cit. iv.), pp. 47-53; cf. Kaligone (ibid. vol. xxii.), passim; and fragment on Plastic. claim no concern with the objects of art, which are obliged to keep themselves in real independence, rejecting all relation with the merely sensory. That which pleases these senses is not the beautiful of art.1 It was Schleiermacher once more who recognized the impossibility of disposing of the matter in this summary fashion. He refused to admit the distinction between confused senses and clear senses, and asserted that the superiority of sight and hearing over the other senses lay in the fact that the others "are not capable of any free activity, and indeed represent the maximum of passivity, whereas sight and hearing are capable of an activity proceeding from within, and are able to produce forms and notes without having received impressions from outside"; were eye and ear merely means of perception, there would be no visual or auditory arts, but they also operate as a function of voluntary movements which supply a content to the dominion of the senses. From another standpoint, however, Schleiermacher thinks that "the difference seems to be one rather of degree or quantity, and a minimum of independence must be recognized as existing in the other senses as well." 2 Vischer remains faithful to the traditional "two æsthetic senses," 'free organs and no less spiritual than sensuous," which "have no reference to the material composition of the object," but allow this "to subsist as a whole and work upon them." Köstlin was of opinion that the inferior senses offer" nothing intuitible separate from themselves, and are only modifications of ourselves, but taste, smell and touch are not devoid of all æsthetic importance, since they assist the superior senses; without touch an image could not be recognized by the eye as being hard, resistant or rough; without smell certain images could not be represented as sweet or scented." 4 We cannot go into a detailed account of all doctrines connected with sensationalistic principles,5 for all the 1 Vorles. üb. Asth. i. pp. 50-51. 3 Asth. i. p. 181. 2 Op. cit. p. 92 seqq. 5 E.g. Grant Allen, Physiological Esthetics, chs. 4 and 5. senses are naturally accepted as æsthetic by the sensationalists, who use æsthetic" interchangeably with "hedonistic": it will suffice if we recall the "learned " Kralik, who was ridiculed by Tolstoy for his theory of the five arts of taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight.1 The few quotations already given show the embarrassing difficulty caused by the use of the word "æsthetic" as a qualification of "sense," compelling writers to invent absurd distinctions between various groups of senses, or to recognize all senses as being æsthetic, thus giving æsthetic value to every sensory impression, as such. No way out of this labyrinth can be found save by asserting the impossibility of effecting a union between such wholly disparate orders of ideas as the concept of the representative form of the spirit and that of particular physiological organs or a particular matter of sense-impressions.2 III. A variety of the error of literary kinds is to be The theory of found in the theory of modes, forms or kinds of style kinds of style (χαρακτῆρες τῆς φράσεως), considered by the ancients as consisting of three forms, the sublime, the medium and the tenuous, a tripartition due, it would seem, to Antisthenes,3 modified later into subtile, robustum and floridum, or amplified into a fourfold division, or designated by adjectives of historic origin as in the Attic, Asiatic or Rhodian styles. The Middle Ages preserved the tradition of a tripartite division, sometimes giving it a curious interpretation, to the effect that the sublime style treats of kings, princes and barons (e.g. the Aeneid); the mediocre, of middle-class people (e.g. Georgics); the humble, of the lowest class (e.g. Bucolics); and the three styles were for this reason also called tragic, elegiac and comic. It is a well-known fact that kinds in style have never ceased to afford matter for discussion in rhetorical text-books down to modern times; for instance, we find Blair distinguishing styles by such epithets as the diffuse, the 1 Tolstoy, What is Art? pp. 19-22. Kralik is the author of Weltschönheit, Versuch einer allgemeinen Ästhetik, Vienna, 1894. 2 See above, pp. 18-20. 3 Cf. Volkmann, Rhet. d. G. u. Röm. pp. 532-544. 4 Comparetti, Virgilio nel M. E. i. p. 172. |