mœurs de son siècle, on peut aisément lui confronter la copie, c'est-à-dire la poésie qui les imite." In judging ancient writers something more is necessary : "" cette règle du premier aspect n'est presque d'aucun usage dans l'examen de l'ancienne poésie, dont on ne peut pas juger qu'après avoir longtemps réfléchi sur la religion des anciens, sur leurs lois, leurs mœurs, sur leurs manières de combattre et d'haranguer, etc. Les beautés d'un poème, indépendantes de toutes ces circonstances individuelles, sont très rares, et les grands peintres les ont toujours évitées avec soin, car ils voulaient peindre la nature et non pas leurs idées; "1 the necessary criterion, therefore, is to be found in history. The end of the same century saw the concept of congenial reproduction sufficiently defined by Heydenreich: “A philosophical critic of art must himself be possessed of genius for art; reason exacts this qualification and grants no dispensation, just as she will refuse to appoint a blind man as judge of colours. The critic must not pretend to be able to feel the attraction of beauty by means of syllogisms (Vernunftschlüsse); beauty must manifest itself to feeling with irresistible self-evidence and, attracted by its fascination, reason must find no time to linger over the why and wherefore; the effect, with its delightful and unexpected possession and domination of the whole being, should suffocate at birth any inquiry into origins or causes. But this state of fanatical admiration cannot last long; reason must inevitably recover consciousness of itself and direct its attention upon the state in which it was during the enjoyment of beauty and upon its present memories of that state. . . ." 2 This was the wholesomely impressionistic theory which prevailed among the Romanticists and was accepted even by De Sanctis.3 Still there was even then no definite theory of criticism, which demanded as its condition of existence a precise concept of art and of the relations of the work of art with its historical antecedents.4 The very possibility of

1 Letter to Maffei, in Prose e poesie, ii. pp. cxx-cxxi.

2 System d. Asthetik, pref. pp. xxi-xxv.

3 Amongst other places Saggi critici, pp. 355-358.
4 See above, pp. 123-127.

Distinction between taste and genius.

Concept of artistic and literary history.

æsthetic criticism was questioned in the second half of the nineteenth century, when taste was relegated to a place amongst the facts of individual caprice, and a socalled historical criticism was proclaimed the sole scientific criticism and expounded in works of irrelevant learning or buried beneath the preconceptions of positivists and materialists. Those who reacted against such externalism and materialism generally made the mistake of supporting themselves by a kind of intellectualistic dogmatism1 or an empty æstheticism.2

VI. We have seen that in the seventeenth century, when the words taste" and "genius or wit" were in fashion, the facts they designated were sometimes interchanged amongst themselves and came to be considered as one single fact, while sometimes each was conceived as distinct in itself, genius being the faculty of production, and taste the faculty of judgement, taste being further subdivided into the sterile and the fertile: a terminology adopted by Muratori in Italy and Ulrich König in Germany. Batteux said, "le goût juge des productions du génie";5 and Kant speaks of defective works having genius without taste or taste without genius, and of others in which taste alone suffices; now we find him distinguishing the two concepts as the judging and producing faculties, now he speaks of them as a single faculty existing in various degrees. An inherent difference between taste and genius was accepted by later writers on Esthetic and assumed its most rigid form in the hands of Herbart and his followers.

VII. The evolutionary theory of art made its appearance towards the end of the eighteenth century. This was the time when the distinction between classical and romantic art was first made; a classification later augmented by an introductory section on Oriental art, owing to the increase of knowledge concerning the pre-Hellenic 1 E.g. A. Ricardou, La Critique littéraire, Paris, 1896. 2 E.g. A. Conti, Sul fiume del tempo, Naples, 1907.

3 Perf. poesia, bk. v.

ch. 5.

4 Untersuchung v. d. guten Geschmack, 1727.
5 Les Beaux Arts, part ii. ch. 1.

Krit. d. Urtheilskr. § 48.

world. Towards the end of his life Goethe told his friend Eckermann that the concepts of classical and romantic had been formed by himself and Schiller, for he himself had upheld the objective method in poetry, whilst Schiller, in order to champion the subjective form to which he inclined, had written the essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, in which the word naïve (naiv) expresses the style later called classical and the word sentimental (sentimentalisch) that later called romantic. "The Schlegels," continues Goethe, "seized upon these ideas and disseminated them, so that to-day everyone uses them and speaks of classical and romantic, things perfectly unknown fifty years ago "1 (Goethe was speaking in 1831). Schiller's essay bears the imprint of Rousseau's influence and is dated 1795-6.2 It contains such statements as this: "Poets are above all things the preservers of nature; and when they cannot be so entirely, and have tried upon themselves the destructive force of arbitrary and artificial forms or have fought against such forms, they stand up to bear witness on her behalf. Poets, therefore, either are nature or, having lost her, seek her. Hence arise two wholly distinct kinds of poetic composition, exhausting between them the whole field of poetry; all poets who are worthy of the name must belong, according to the times and conditions in which they flourish, either to the category of naïve or to that of sentimental poets." Schiller recognized three kinds of sentimental poetry: satirical, elegiac and idyllic; he defined a satirical poet as one "who takes as his object the desertion of nature and the contrast of the real with the ideal." The weak point of this division is the concept of two distinct kinds of poetry, the reduction of the infinite forms in which poetry appears to individuals, to two kinds. If one of these two kinds be taken the perfect and the other as the imperfect kind, the mistake is made of converting imperfection into a kind or species, the negative into a positive.

1 Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, under date March 21, 1831. 2 Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 1795-1796 (in Werke, ed. Goedeke, vol. xii.).

Wilhelm von Humboldt pointed out to his friend that if form is the essence of art, there cannot be a kind of poetry, such as the sentimental or romantic is supposed to be, in which matter preponderates over form, for that would constitute a pseudo-art, not a separate kind of art.1 Schiller attached no historical meaning to his classification, in fact he declared explicitly that in using the words "ancient " and "modern" as equivalent to ingenuous and sentimental" he did not mean to deny that some "ancient" poets, in his sense of the word, could be found among contemporary writers; the two characters might even be united in the same poet or the same poetical work, as (to give Schiller's own example) in Werther. The first to assign a historical meaning to the division were Friedrich and Wilhelm von Schlegel; the former in an early work of 1795, the latter in his celebrated lectures on literary history given at Berlin in 1801-4. But the two senses, systematic and historical, were variously alternated and mixed by literary men and critics, and other distinctions were added; classical " was sometimes used to describe poetry of a frigid and imitative style, while "romantic" poetry was the inspired; in some countries the word "romantic" came to mean a political reactionary, in Italy it stood for "liberal"; and so forth. In 1815, when Friedrich Schlegel spoke of ancient Persian romantic poems, or when in our times attention is called to the romanticism of the Greek, Latin or French classics, the historical signification is lost in the theoretical, the sense originally intended by Schiller.

But the historical sense was prevalent in German idealism, which inclined towards the construction of a universal history, including that of literature and art, upon a scheme of ideal evolution. Schelling made a sharp division between pagan and Christian art; the second being held an advance upon the former which was the lowest step.3 Hegel accepted this division and

1 Quoted in Danzel, Ges. Aufs. pp. 21-22. 2 Üb. naive u. sentim. Dicht., ed. cit., p. 155, note.

3 See above, p. 291.

introduced a final regress by dividing the history of art into three periods: symbolic (Oriental) art, classical (Hellenic) and romantic (modern). Just as he conceived Roman art (with its introduction of satire and other kinds indicative of a failure to maintain harmony between form and content) as the dissolution of classical art, a thought suggested by Schiller, so he found in the subjective humour of Cervantes and Ariosto 1 the dissolution of romantic art; and he regarded this series as completing the possibilities of art, though some interpreters think that by a self-contradiction he admitted the possibility of a fourth period, an art of the modern or future world. Indeed amongst his disciples we find Weiss rejecting the Oriental period in order to save the triadic division, and placing as third the modern period, synthesis of the ancient and the mediæval: 2 Vischer too inclines to recognize a modern or progressive period.3

These arbitrary constructions reappear in the works of positivist metaphysicians in the shape of an evolutionary or progressive history of art. Spencer dreamed of writing some sort of treatise on the subject, and in the published programme of his system (1860) we read that the third volume of his Principles of Sociology was to contain amongst other things a chapter on æsthetic progress with the gradual differentiation of fine arts from primitive institutions and from each other, with their increasing variety in development, their progress in reality of expression and superiority of end." No grief need be felt that the chapter was left unwritten when we remember the samples of it preserved in the Principles of Psychology and already reviewed in these pages.

4

The strong historical sense of our own day is leading us further and further away from the evolutionary or abstractly progressive theories which falsify the free and original movement of art. Fiedler remarked not without justice that unity and progress cannot be introduced into

1 Vorles. üb. Asth., vols. ii. and iii.

2 Cf. von Hartmann, Dtsche. Asth. s. Kant, pp. 99-101. 3 Asth. part iii.

4 See above, pp. 388-390.