his first, The Birth of Tragedy,1 in spite of the title, does he offer us a real theory of art; what appears to be theory is the mere expression of the author's feelings and tendencies. He shows a kind of anxiety concerning the value and aim of art and the problem of its inferiority or superiority to science and philosophy, a state of mind characteristic of the Romantic period of which Nietzsche was, in many respects, a belated but magnificent representative. To Romanticism, as well as to Schopenhauer, belong the elements of thought which issued in the distinction between Apollinesque art (that of serene contemplation, to which belong the epic and sculpture) and Dionysiac art (the art of agitation and tumult, such as music and the drama). The thought is vague and does not bear criticism; but it is supported by a flight of inspiration which lifts the mind to a spiritual region seldom if ever reached again in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The most notable æsthetic students of that time were perhaps a group of persons engaged in constructing theories of particular arts. And since-as we have seen 2-philosophical laws or theories of individual arts are inconceivable, it was inevitable that the ideas presented by such. thinkers should be (as indeed they are) nothing more than general æsthetic conclusions. First may be mentioned the An asthetician acute Bohemian critic Eduard Hanslick, who published his work On Musical Beauty in 1854; it was often reprinted and was translated into various languages. Hanslick waged war against Richard Wagner and in general against the pretension of finding concepts, feelings and other definite contents in music. "In the most insignificant musical works, where the most powerful microscope can discover nothing, we are now asked to recognize a Night Before the Battle, a Summer Night in Norway, a Longing for the Sea, or some such absurdity,

of music:
E. Hanslick.

1 Die Geburt der Tragödie oder Griechenthum und Pessimismus, 1872 (Ital. trans., Bari, 1907).

2 See above, p. 114.

3 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Leipzig, 1854; 7th ed. 1885 (French trans., Du beau dans la musique, Paris, 1877).

3

the va

"1

should the cover have the audacity to affirm that this is
the subject of the piece." With equal vivacity he
protests against the sentimental hearers who, instead of
enjoying the work of art, set themselves to extract
pathological effects of passionate excitement and practical
activity. If it be true that Greek music produced effects
of this kind, "if it needed but a few Phrygian strains to
animate troops with courage in the face of the enemy, or
a melody in the Dorian mode to ensure the fidelity of a
wife whose husband was far away, then the loss of Greek
music is a melancholy thing for generals and husbands;
but æstheticians and composers need not regret it." 2
"If every senseless Requiem, every noisy funeral march,
every wailing Adagio had the power of depressing us, who
could put up with existence under such conditions? But
let a real musical work confront us, clear-eyed and glowing
with beauty, and we feel ourselves enslaved by its invin-
cible fascination even if its material is all the sorrows of the
age." Hanslick maintained that the sole aim of music Hanslick's
is form, musical beauty. This affirmation won him the concept of
goodwill of the Herbartians, who hastened to welcome such
a vigorous and unexpected ally; by way of returning the
compliment, Hanslick felt obliged in later editions of his
work to mention Herbart himself and his faithful disciple
Robert Zimmermann who had given (so he said) full
development to the great æsthetic principle of Form." 4
The praises of the Herbartians and the courteous declara-
tions of Hanslick both arose from a misunderstanding :
for the words "beauty" and "form" have one meaning
for the former and quite another for the latter. Hanslick
never thought that symmetry, purely acoustical relations
and pleasures of the ear constituted musical beauty;
mathematics, he held, are utterly useless to musical
Esthetic. Musical beauty is spiritual and significative:
it has thoughts, undoubtedly; but those thoughts are
musical. Sonorous forms are not empty, but perfectly

"3

5

form.

Estheticians of the figurative arts.

C. Fiedler.

"2

filled; they cannot be compared with simple lines delimiting a space; they are the spirit assuming body and extracting from itself the stuff of its own incarnation. Rather than an arabesque, music is a picture; but a picture whose subject can neither be expressed in words nor enclosed in precise concept. There are in music both meaning and connexion, but these are of a specifically musical nature; music is a language we understand and speak, but which it is not possible to translate."1 Hanslick asserts that though music does not portray the quality of feelings, it does portray their dynamic aspect or tone if not the substantives, then the adjectives: it depicts not "murmuring tenderness" or "impetuous courage," but the "murmuring" and the "impetuous.' The backbone of the book is the denial that form and content can ever be separated in music. "In music there can be no content in opposition to the form, since there can be no form outside the content." "Take a motive, the first that comes into your head; what is its content, what its form? where does this begin, and that end? . . . What do you wish to call content? The sounds? Very well but they have already received a form. What will you call form? Also the sounds? but they are form already filled; form supplied with content." Such observations denote acute penetration of the nature of art, though not scientifically formulated or framed into a system. Hanslick thought he was dealing with peculiarities of music, instead of with the universal and constitutive character of every form of art, and this prevented him from taking larger views.

Another specialist æsthetician is Conrad Fiedler, author
of many essays on the figurative arts, the most important
being his Origin of Artistic Activity (1887).5 No one,
perhaps, has better or more eloquently emphasized the
activistic character of art, which he compares with
2 Op. cit. pp. 25-39.
Op. cit. pp. 52, 67, 113, etc.
• Conrad Fiedler, Der Ursprung der künstlerischen Thätigkeit,
Leipzig, 1887. Collected with others of same author in Schriften über
die Kunst, ed. H. Marbach, Leipzig, 1896.

1 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, pp. 50-51.
3 Op. cit. p. 122.

4

language. "Art begins exactly where intuition (percep-
tion) ends. The artist is not differentiated from other
people by any special perceptive attitude enabling him
to perceive more or with greater intensity, or endowing his
eye with any special power of selecting, collecting, trans-
forming, ennobling or illuminating; but rather by his
peculiar gift of being able to pass immediately from per-
ception to intuitive expression; his relation with nature
is not perceptive, but expressive." "A man standing
passively at gaze may well imagine himself in possession
of the visible world as an immense, rich, varied whole :
the entire absence of fatigue with which he traverses the
infinite mass of visual impressions, the rapidity with
which representations dart across his consciousness,
convince him that he stands in the midst of an immense
visible world, although he may quite well be unable at
any one instant to represent it to himself as a whole. But
this world, so great, so rich, so immeasurable, disappears
the moment art seeks to become its master. The very
first effort to emerge from this twilight and arrive at clear
vision restricts the circle of things to be seen. Artistic
activity may be conceived as continuation of that concen-
tration by which consciousness makes the first step
towards clear vision, which it reaches only by self-limita-
tion." Spiritual process and bodily process are here an
indivisible whole, which is expression. "This activity, Intuition and
simply because it is spiritual, must consist of forms Expression.
wholly determinate, tangible, sensibly demonstrative."
Art is not in a state of subjection to science. Like the
man of science, the artist desires to escape from the
natural perceptive state and to make the world his own;
but there are regions to which we can penetrate not by the
forms of thought and science but only through art. Art
is, strictly speaking, not imitation of nature; for what is
nature save this confused mass of perceptions and repre-
sentations, whose real poverty has been demonstrated
already? In another sense, however, art may be called
imitation of nature inasmuch as its aim is not to expound
concepts or to arouse emotions, that is to create values of

Narrow limits

of these theories.

H. Bergson.

intellect and feeling. Art does create both these values,
if you like to say so; but only in one quite peculiar
quality, which consists in complete visibility (Sichtbar-
keit).
Here we have the same sane conception, the
same lively comprehension of the true nature of art which
we found in Hanslick, only expressed in a more rigorous
and philosophical manner. With Fiedler is connected
his friend Adolf Hildebrand, who brought into high relief
the activistic, or architectonic as opposed to imitative,
character of art, illustrating his theoretical discussions
especially from sculpture, the art which he himself
followed.1

What we chiefly miss in Fiedler and others of the same tendency is the conception of the aesthetic fact not as something exceptional, produced by exceptionally gifted men, but as a ceaseless activity of man as such; for man possesses the world, so far as he does possess it, only in the form of representation-expressions, and only knows in so far as he creates.2 Nor are these writers justified in treating language as parallel with art, or art with language; for comparisons are drawn between things at least partially different, whereas art and language are identical. The same criticism can be made in the case of the French philosopher Bergson, who in his book on Laughter 3 states a theory of art very similar to that of Fiedler and makes the same mistake of conceiving the artistic faculty as something distinct and exceptional in comparison with the language of everyday use. In ordinary life, says Bergson, the individuality of things escapes us; we see only as much of them as our practical needs demand. Language helps this simplification; since all names, proper names excepted, are names of kinds or classes. Now and then, however, nature, as if in a fit of absence of mind, creates souls of a more divisible and detached kind (artists), who discover and reveal the riches hidden under 1 Das Problem der Form in der bildunden Kunst, 2nd ed. 1898 (4th ed., Strassburg, 1903).

2 See above, pp. 12-18.

3 H. Bergson, Le Rire, essai sur la signification du comique, Paris, 1900, pp. 153-161 (Eng. tr., London).