Criticism of the sym- who find in the sale of their verses an aid to life if not a complete living. This deduction and definition has not failed to attract some zealous neophytes in historical materialism. Another less vulgar current of thought considers of the Esthetic Esthetic as the science of the sympathetic, as that with which we sympathize, which attracts, rejoices, arouses pleasure and admiration. But the sympathetic is nothing but the image or representation of what pleases. And as such it is a complex fact, resulting from a constant element, the æsthetic element of representation, and a variable element, the pleasing in its infinite forms, arising from all the various classes of values. Esthetic moralism. In ordinary language, there is sometimes a feeling of repugnance at calling an expression "beautiful," unless it is an expression of the sympathetic. Hence the continual conflicts between the point of view of the æsthetician or art critic and that of the ordinary person, who cannot succeed in persuading himself that the image of pain and baseness can be beautiful or at least that it has as much right to be beautiful as the pleasing and the good. The conflict could be put an end to by distinguishing two different sciences, one of expression and the other of the sympathetic, if the latter could be the object of a special science; that is to say, if it were not, as has been shown, a complex and equivocal concept. If predominance be given to the expressive fact, it enters Esthetic as science of expression; if to the pleasurable content, we fall back to the study of facts essentially hedonistic (utilitarian), however complicated they may appear. The particular origin of the doctrine which conceives the relation between form and content as the sum of two values is also to be sought in the doctrine of the sympathetic. In all the doctrines just now discussed, art is conhedonism and sidered as a merely hedonistic thing. But æsthetic hedonism cannot be maintained, save by uniting it with a general philosophical hedonism, which does not admit any other form of value. Hardly has this hedonistic conception of art been received by philosophers who admit one or more spiritual values, truth or morality, when the following question must necessarily be asked: What must be done with art? To what use should it be put ? Should a free course be allowed to the pleasures it procures? And if so, to what extent? The question of the end of art, which in the Esthetic of expression is inconceivable, has a clear significance in the Esthetic of the Sympathetic and demands a solution. of art. Now it is evident that such solution can have but The rigoristic two forms, one altogether negative, the other of a re- negation, and the pedagogic strictive nature. The first, which we shall call rigoristic justification or ascetic, appears several times, although not frequently, in the history of ideas. It looks upon art as an inebriation of the senses and therefore as not only useless but harmful. According to this theory, then, we must exert all our strength to liberate the human soul from its disturbing influence. The other solution, which we shall call pedagogic or moralistic-utilitarian, admits art, but only in so far as it co-operates with the end of morality; in so far as it assists with innocent pleasure the work of him who points the way to the true and the good; in so far as it anoints the edge of the cup of wisdom and morality with sweet honey. It is well to observe that it would be an error to divide this second view into intellectualistic and moralistic-utilitarian, according as to whether be assigned to art the end of leading to the true or to what is practically good. The educational task which is imposed upon it, precisely because it is an end which is sought after and advised, is no longer merely a theoretical fact, but a theoretical fact already become the ground for practical action; it is not, therefore, intellectualism, but pedagogism and practicism. Nor would it be more exact to subdivide the pedagogic view into pure utilitarian and moralistic-utilitarian; because those who admit only the satisfaction of the individual (the desire of the individual), precisely because they are absolute hedonists, have no motive for seeking an ulterior justification for art. Criticism of pure beauty. But to enunciate these theories at the point to which we have attained is to confute them. We prefer to restrict ourselves to observing that in the pedagogic theory of art is to be found another of the reasons why the claim has erroneously been made that the content of art should be chosen with a view to certain practical effects. The thesis that art consists of pure beauty has often been brought forward against hedonistic and pedagogic Esthetic, and eagerly taken up by artists: "Heaven places all our joy in pure beauty, and the Verse is everything." If by this be understood that art is not to be confounded with sensual pleasure (utilitarian practicism), nor with the exercise of morality, then our Esthetic also must be permitted to adorn itself with the title of Esthetic of pure beauty. But if (as is often the case) something mystical and transcendent be meant by this, something unknown to our poor human world, or something spiritual and beatific, but not expressive, we must reply that while applauding the conception of a beauty free from all that is not the spiritual form of expression, we are unable to conceive a beauty superior to this and still less that it should be purified of expression, or severed from itself. XII THE ESTHETIC OF THE SYMPATHETIC AND PSEUDO-ÆSTHETIC CONCEPTS æsthetic concepts, and of the sympathetic. THE doctrine of the sympathetic (very often animated Pseudoand seconded in this by the capricious metaphysical and mystical Esthetic, and by that blind traditionalism the aesthetic which assumes an intimate connection between things fortuitously treated together by the same authors in the same books), has introduced and rendered familiar in systems of Esthetic a series of concepts a rapid mention of which suffices to justify our resolute expulsion of them from our own treatise. Their catalogue is long, not to say interminable : tragic, comic, sublime, pathetic, moving, sad, ridiculous, melancholy, tragi-comic, humorous, majestic, dignified, serious, grave, imposing, noble, decorous, graceful, attractive, piquant, coquettish, idyllic, elegiac, cheerful, violent, ingenuous, cruel, base, horrible, disgusting, dreadful, nauseating; the list can be increased at will. Since that doctrine took the sympathetic as its special object, it was naturally unable to neglect any of the varieties of the sympathetic, any of the mixtures or gradations by means of which, starting from the sympathetic in its loftiest and most intense manifestation, its contrary, the antipathetic and repugnant, is finally reached. And since the sympathetic content was held to be the beautiful and the antipathetic the ugly, the varieties (tragic, comic, sublime, pathetic, etc.) constituted for that conception of Æsthetic the shades and gradations intervening between the beautiful and the ugly. Criticism of the theory Pseudo æsthetic Having enumerated and defined as well as it could, the chief of these varieties, the Esthetic of the sympathetic set itself the problem of the place to be assigned to the ugly in art. This problem is without meaning for us, who do not recognize any ugliness save the antiæsthetic or inexpressive, which can never form part of the aesthetic fact, being, on the contrary, its antithesis. But in the doctrine which we are here criticizing the positing and discussion of that problem meant neither more nor less than the necessity of reconciling in some way the false and defective idea of art from which it started-art reduced to the representation of the pleasurable-with real art, which occupies a far wider field. Hence the artificial attempt to settle what examples of the ugly (antipathetic) could be admitted in artistic representation, and for what reasons, and in what ways. The answer was that the ugly is admissible, only when it can be overcome; an unconquerable ugliness, such as the disgusting or the nauseating, being altogether excluded. Further, that the duty of the ugly, when admitted in art, is to contribute towards heightening the effect of the beautiful (sympathetic), by producing a series of contrasts, from which the pleasurable may issue more efficacious and joy-giving. It is, indeed, a common observation that pleasure is more vividly felt when preceded by abstinence and suffering. Thus the ugly in art was looked upon as adapted for the service of the beautiful, a stimulant and condiment of æsthetic pleasure. That special refinement of hedonistic theory which used to be pompously called the doctrine of the overcoming of the ugly falls with the Esthetic of the sympathetic, and with it the enumeration and definition of the concepts mentioned above, which show themselves to be completely foreign to Esthetic. For Esthetic does not recognize the sympathetic or the antipathetic or their varieties, but only the spiritual activity of representation. Nevertheless, the important place which, as we have concepts belong said, those concepts have hitherto occupied in æsthetic to Psychology. treatises makes it advisable to supply a rather more |