Immagini della pagina
PDF
ePub

Limits and classifications of the arts in later philosophy.

Herder and
Kant.

Schelling.

Solger.

the audible by means of the visible. Desirous of preserv ing 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 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; 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.

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 Ästhetik, pp. 154-236.
4 Kritik d. Urtheilskr. § 51.

5 Phil. d. Kunst, pp. 370-371.

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

4

:

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 with-
out 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 investiga-
tion 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 im-
placable against those who look in one art for the per-
fections 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 re-
presentative art).8 Vischer classified them according to Vischer.
1 Vorles. üb. Asth. pp. 257-262. 2 Op. cit. ii. p. 222.
3 See above, pp. 305-306.

• Einleitung, § 115, PP. 170-171.
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.

M. Schasler.

E. v.
Hartmann.

1

the three forms of imagination (figurative, sensuous and poetic), into objective arts (architecture, plastic and painting), a subjective art (music) and an objective-subjective art (poetry). Gerber proposed to recognize a special "art of language" (Sprachkunst), distinguishable alike from prose and poetry and consisting in the expression of simple movements of the soul. Such an art would correspond with plastic in the following scheme: arts of the eye (a) architecture, (b) plastic, (c) painting; arts of the ear—(a) prose, (b) the art of language, (c) poetry.2

The two most recent systems of classification are furnished by Schasler and Hartmann, who have also submitted the schemes of their predecessors to searching criticism. Schasler 3 arranges the arts in two groups, adopting the criterion of simultaneity and succession : the arts of simultaneity are architecture, plastic and painting; of succession, music, mimicry and poetry. He says that by following the series in the order indicated, it will be seen that simultaneity, originally predominant, yields place to succession, which predominates in the second group and subordinates without wholly displacing the other. Parallel with this, another division is evolved, deduced from the relation between the ideal and material elements in each separate art, between movement and repose; which begins with architecture "materially the heaviest, spiritually the lightest of all the arts," and ends with poetry, in which the opposite relation is observed. Curious analogies are established by this method between the first and second group of arts: between architecture and music; between plastic and mimicry; between painting in its three forms of landscape, genre and historical, and poetry in its three forms of lyric (declamatory), epic (rhapsodic) and drama (representative). Hartmann' divides the arts into arts of perception and arts of imagination: the former tripartite

1 Asth. §§ 404, 535, 537, 838, etc.

2 Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, Bromberg, 1871-1874.
3 Das System der Künste, 2nd ed., Leipzig-Berlin, 1881.

4 Phil. d. Sch. chs. 9, 10.

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors]

into spatial or visual (plastic and painting), temporal or auditory (instrumental music, linguistic mimicry, expressive song) and temporal-spatial or mimic (pantomime, mimic dances, art of the actor, art of the opera-singer); the second contains but one single species, which is poetry. Architecture, decoration, gardening, cosmetic and prosewriting are excluded from this system of classification and lumped together as non-free arts.

Wagner.

Parallel with this search for a classification of the arts, The supreme the same philosophers were led into the quest of the art. Richard supreme art. Some favoured poetry, others music or sculpture; others again claimed the supremacy for combined arts, especially for Opera, according to the theory of it already advanced in the eighteenth century 1 and maintained and developed in our day by Richard Wagner. One of the latest philosophers to raise the question "whether single arts, or arts in combination, had the greater value," concluded that single arts as such. possess their own perfection, yet the perfection of united arts is still greater, notwithstanding the compromises and mutual concessions enforced upon them by their union; that single arts, from another point of view, have the greater value; and lastly, that both single and combined arts are necessary to the realisation of the concept of art.3

classifications.

The capriciousness, emptiness and childishness of such Lotze's problems and their solutions must have excited feelings of attack on impatience and disgust, but we rarely find a doubt thrown on their validity. One such dissentient is Lotze when he writes: "It is difficult to see the use of such attempts. Knowledge of the nature and laws of individual arts is but little increased by indication of the systematic place allotted to each." He further observed that in real life the arts are variously conjoined, forming themselves into no systematic series, while in the world of thought an immense variety of orders can be created; he therefore selected one of these possible orders, not because it was

1

1 E.g. by Sulzer, Allg. Theorie, on word Oper.

2 Rich. Wagner, Oper und Drama, 1851.

9 Gustav Engel, Asth. der Tonkunst, 1884, abstracted in Hartmann, Dtsche. Asth. s. Kant, pp. 579-580.

the sole legitimate one, but because it was convenient (bequem). His series begins with music, "the art of free beauty, determined only by the laws of its matter, not by conditions imposed by a given task of purpose or of imitation"; followed by architecture, "which no longer plays freely with forms, but subjects them to the service of an end"; and then by sculpture, painting and poetry, excluding minor arts which cannot be co-ordinated with the others, since they are incapable of expressing with any approach to completeness the totality of the spiritual life.1 A recent French critic, Basch, opens his treatise with the following excellent remarks: "Is it necessary to show there is no such thing as an absolute art, differentiating itself later by means of one knows not what immanent laws? What exists is the particular forms of art, or rather artists who have striven to translate, as best they can, according to the material means at their command, the song of the ideal in their souls." But later on he thinks it possible to effect a division of the arts by starting" from the artist, instead of the art in itself," by proceeding" according to the three great types of fancy, visual, motor and auditory"; and as for the debated point of the supreme art, he thinks it must be settled in favour of music.2

Schasler is not altogether wrong in his spirited counterattack on Lotze's criticism; he protests against the principle of indifference and convenience, and remarks that "the classification of the arts must be regarded as the real touchstone, the real differential test of the scientific value of an æsthetic system; for on this point all theoretical questions are concentrated and crowd Contradictions together to find a concrete solution." The principle of convenience may be excellent as applied to the approximative grouping of botanical or zoological classifications, but it has no place in philosophy; and as Lotze, in common with Schasler and other æstheticians, conformed

in Lotze.

3

1 Lotze, Geschichte d. Asth. pp. 458-460; cf. p. 445.
2 Essai critique sur l'Esth. de Kant, pp. 89-496.
3 Das System der Künste, p. 47.

to

« IndietroContinua »