Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

VI Minor Æsthetic Doctrines of the Eighteenth Century

The influence of Vico.

This step in advance had no immediate effect. The pages in the Scienza nuova devoted to æsthetic doctrine were actually the least read of any in that marvellous book. Not that Vico exercised no influence at all; we shall see that several Italian authors both of his own time and of the generation immediately following show traces of his æsthetic ideas; but these traces are all external and material and therefore sterile. Outside Italy the Scienza nuova (already announced by a compatriot in 1726 in the Acta of Leipzig with the graceful comment that magis indulget ingenio quam veritati and the pleasing information that ab ipsis Italis taedio magis quam applausu excipitur)1 was mentioned toward the end of the century, as is well known, by Herder, Goethe, and some few others.2 In connection with poetry, especially with the Homeric question, Vico’s book was quoted by Friedrich August Wolf, to whom it had been recommended by Cesarotti3 after the publication of the Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), but without any suspicion of the importance of its general doctrine of poetry, of which the Homeric hypothesis was a mere application. Wolf (1807) imagined himself in the presence of a talented forerunner in an isolated problem, instead of a man of intellectual stature towering above any philologist, however great.

Italian writers: Conti.

Neither by reliance on the works of Vico, who founded no real school, nor, it must be added, by any independent effort along new lines, did thought succeed in maintaining or improving upon the position already attained. A notable attempt to establish a philosophical theory of poetry and the arts was made by the Venetian A. Conti, who left numerous sketches for essays on imagination, the faculties of the soul, poetic imitation and similar subjects, designed for inclusion in a large treatise on the Beautiful and Art. Conti had started by professing ideas very like those of Du Bos, affirming that the poet must “put everything in images”; that taste is as indefinable as feeling, and that there are persons without taste just as there are blind and deaf persons; he also wrote polemical tracts against the Cartesians. Later he abandoned his sensationalistic or sentimentalist theories,4 and, inquiring into the nature of poetry, declared himself ill-satisfied with Castelvetro, Patrizzi, and even Gravina. “Had Castelvetro,” he observes, “who writes so subtly of Aristotle’s Poetics, given two or three chapters to a philosophical explanation of the idea of imitation, he would have solved many questions raised but not clearly answered by himself concerning poetic theories. In his Poetica and in his controversy against Torquato Tasso, Patrizzi never succeeded in clearly defining the philosophical idea of imitation; he collected much useful information about the history of poetry, but wilfully lost the Platonic doctrine by allowing it to mingle with the historical detail instead of gathering it up without sophistry into a single point, when it would have appeared in a very different guise. The Ragion poetica of Gravina shadows forth a sort of philosophical idea of imitation; but so wholly engrossed is he in deducing therefrom rules for lyrical, dramatical and epic poetry, and illustrating each with examples from the most celebrated poets, Greek, Latin and Italian, that he is too busy to question the sufficiency of the fertile idea he has propounded.”5 A close follower of contemporary European thought, Conti was familiar with Hutcheson, whose theories he vigorously repudiated, observing, “Why this multiplication of faculties?” The soul is one, and for scholastic convenience only has been divided into three faculties: sense, imagination, intellect; the first “concerns herself with objects present before her; imagination with those afar into which memory gradually merges: but the object of sense and imagination is always particular; it is only the mind, the intellect, the spirit, that by comparing particulars apprehends the universal.” “Before introducing a new sense for the pleasure of beauty” Hutcheson should have “assigned limits to these three faculties of cognition and demonstrated that the pleasure occasioned by beauty does not arise from the three pleasures of these three faculties, or from intellectual pleasure alone, to which they all reduce, if the functions of the soul be carefully analysed.” Thus it would appear that the mistake of the Scotchman6 arose from his habit of separating pleasure from the cognitive faculties, placing the former apart in a special empty “sense of beauty.”7 On the other hand, when rewriting the history of the opinions of various critics upon the Aristotelian doctrine of the universal in poetry, Conti gave much weight to the dialogue Naugerius seu De poëtica of Fracastoro;8 for an instant he seems on the point of grasping the essence of the poetic universal and identifying it with the characteristic, which makes us call even horrible things wholly beautiful. “In all his journeys Balzac never saw a beautiful old woman: in the poetic or picturesque sense an old woman is highly beautiful, if depicted as having suffered all the dilapidations of age”: immediately after, however, he identifies the characteristic with Wolff’s concept of perfection: “It does not differ from being, nor does being differ from the truth which the schoolmen call transcendental and which is the object of all arts and all sciences; we call it the object of poetry when by means of imaginary presentations it ravishes the intellect and moves the wall, transporting both these faculties into the ideal and archetypal world of which, following S. Augustine, Father Malebranche discourses at length in his Recherche de la vérité.”9 In the same way Fracastoro’s universal gives place to the universal of science: “Owing to the infinity of their determinations all we can know of particulars is their common properties, which is merely another manner of saying that we have no science save of universal. Thus it is precisely the same if we say the object of poetry is science or the universal; which is the doctrine of Navagero, following Aristotle.”10 The “imaginative universals of Signor Vico” (with whom he had interchanged some letters) opened no new views for him: he notes that Signor Vico “talks a great deal about them” and “holds that the most uncivilized men, having framed them not from any wish to please or serve others, but from the necessity of expressing their feelings as nature taught them, spoke in poetical language the elements of a theology, a physics, and an ethics wholly poetical.” Conti excuses himself from immediate examination of “this critical question” and only opines that “it can be shown in many ways that these imaginative universals are the material or object of poetry, in so far as they contain within them sciences or things considered in themselves”11—a conclusion diametrically opposed to that which “Signor Vico” meant to express. Conti is next obliged to ask himself how it is possible that poetry’s object should be not the true but the probable, when the universal of poetry is the same as that of science. He answers by coming down to the commonplace level of a Baumgarten: “When sciences receive a particular colouring, we pass from the true to the probable.” Imitation means giving the impression of truth; that is done by selecting a few of its features only; and this is the procedure in which the probable just consists. If you wish to describe the rainbow poetically, a great part of the Newtonian optics must be thrown overboard; thus “many circumstances of mathematical demonstration” will be neglected in poetical descriptions, and the rest, which is utilized, will form the probable or that particular “which awakens the universal idea, slumbering in the minds of the learned.” The great art of poetry consists “in selection of the image containing the greatest number of points of universal doctrine which, by being inserted in the example, may so colour the precept that I may find it without seeking it, or recognize it through its connexion with events described.”12 Hence poetry cannot be content with imitation; allegory too is needed: “in ancient poetry one thing is read and another is meant.” Here follows the inevitable instance of the Homeric poems, in which Conti certainly finds elements which cannot be reduced to instruction and allegory and therefore to some extent deserve the Platonic condemnation.13 He recognizes a species of imagination differing from passive sensibility, “which Father Malebranche calls active imagination, and Plato the art of imagery; it comprises all that is meant by wit, sagacity, judgement and good taste, which teach a poet to use or not to use at a given time or place the rules and licences of art, and to control the extravagance of his imagery.”14 On the question of literary taste he follows the opinion of Trevisano and decides that it consists in “setting in mutual harmony, that is to say restraining within limits, the soul’s cognitive faculties, memory, imagination and intellect, allowing none to overwhelm another.”15

Quadrio and Zanotti.

By assiduous travail of thought and perpetual search for the best, Conti kept himself at the highest level of æsthetic speculation in contemporary Europe (Vico always excepted); at the same level as Baumgarten in Germany. We pass rapidly over other Italian writers such as Quadrio (1739), author of the first great encyclopædia of universal literature, in which he defines poetry as “the science of things human and divine, presented in pictures to the populace, and written in words connected by measure”;16 and Francesco Maria Zanotti (1768), who describes poetry as “the art of versification in order to give pleasure”:17 the first is worthy of a mediæval anthologist, the second of a no less mediæval composer of handbooks on rhythm and methods of composition. The only serious student of æsthetic was Melchior Cesarotti.

Cesarotti

Cesarotti called attention to popular and primitive poetry: he translated Ossian and illustrated the text with dissertations; he unearthed antique Spanish poems and even the folk-songs of Mexico and Lapland; he studied Hebrew poetry; he dedicated the greater part of his life to the Homeric poems, examining all the theories of critics past and present, encountering Vico in this connexion and discussing his views. Besides this, he debated the origin of poetry, the pleasure given by tragedy, taste, the beautiful, eloquence, style, in short every problem belonging to æsthetics which had been raised up to his time.18 One seems to catch an echo of Vico as one listens to his words on La Motte: “He had logic, but knew not that the logic of poetry differs somewhat from ordinary logic: he was a man of great talent, but he recognized talent only, and was incapable of feeling the immeasurable distance between judicious prose and poetry: the real Homer with his attractive faults will always be more beloved than his reformed Homer with his cold, affected virtue.”19 Cesarotti purposed (1762) bringing out a great theoretico-historical book in whose first part “we shall suppose the non-existence of poetry and poetic art and try to trace by what path a man of illuminated reason can have reached the idea of the possibility of such an art and how he can have attained perfection by these means: every one will be able to see poetry growing up under his eyes, so to speak, and attest the truth of theory by the testimony of his own personal feelings.”20 Although celebrated throughout Italy in his day as one who “with the most pure torch of philosophy has thrown beams of light into the darkest recesses of poetry and eloquence,”21 it does not appear that the distinguished scholar, the pleasing and desultory philosopher, offered any profound or original solutions. In 1797 he defined poetry as “the art of representing and perfecting nature by means of picturesque, animated, imaginative and harmonious discourse.”22

Bettinelli and Pagano.

The fashion of the day in philosophy made men impatient of the ideas found in writers of treatises of former times. Arteaga praises Cesarotti for “that fine tact, that impartial criticism, that logical spirit derived not from the trickling streamlets of Sperone, Castelvetro, Casa and Bembo, but from the profound and inexhaustible springs of Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Sulzer, and writers of like temper.”23 Writing to Saverio Bettinelli, who was preparing a work on Enthusiasm, Paradisi hoped it would prove “a metaphysical history of enthusiasm which shall outweigh all those Poetics which are only fit to be burned,” and would “make waste paper of Castelvetro, the ‘Mintumo,’ and that stupid creature, Quadrio.”24 In spite of these aspirations Bettinelli’s book (1769) contains little beyond vivacious and eloquent empirical observations concerning the psychology of poets, “poetic enthusiasm,” to which he assigns six degrees, namely, elevation, vision, rapidity, novelty and surprise, passion and transfusion. Equally empirical was Mario Pagano in his two fragments, Gusto e le belle arti and Origine e natura della poesia (1783-1785), in which he grotesquely combines some ideas from Vico with the current sensationalism. Theoretico-imaginative form and sensuous pleasure are presented by him as two historical periods of art. “In their cradle the fine arts are directed towards making a true imitation of nature rather than towards loveliness. Their first steps are towards expression rather than charm.... In the most ancient poetry, even in the ballads of barbarous ages, there lives a most compelling pathos: passions are expressed naturally, even the sound of the words is alive with the expression of the things described.” But “the period of perfection is reached at the moment when exact imitation of nature is coupled with complete beauty, accord and harmony,” when “the taste is refined and society reaches its most complete form of culture.” Fine arts “precede by a short time the dawn of philosophy, that is to say, the time of the most intense perfection of society”; indeed, certain modes of art, such as tragedy, must necessarily come later than philosophy whose aid must be invoked to further “the purgation of manners.”25

German disciples of Baumgarten. G. F. Meier.

The compatriots and successors of Baumgarten, like those of Vico, did little by way of understanding or improving upon his work. An enthusiastic admirer and disciple of Baumgarten who had attended his lectures at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, Georg Friedrich Meier, came forward in 1746 to defend the Meditationes against the attacks of Quistorp to whom the master had deigned no reply;26 already in 1748, prior to the publication of the Æsthetic, he had published the first volume of his Principles of all the Beautiful Sciences,27 followed in 1749 and 1750 by the second and third volumes. This book, which is a complete exposition of Baumgarten’s theory, is divided, according to the master’s method, into three parts: invention of beautiful thoughts (heuristic), æsthetic method (methodic), and the beautiful signification of thoughts (semiotic); the first of these (occupying two and a half volumes) is subdivided into three sections: beauty of sense-apprehension (æsthetic richness, grandeur, verisimilitude, vivacity, certainty, sensitive life and wit), sensitive faculties (attention, abstraction, senses, imagination, subtlety, acumen, memory, poetic power, taste, foresight, conjecture, signification and the minor appetitive faculties), and the diverse kinds of beautiful thought (æsthetic concepts, judgements, and syllogisms). Elsewhere than in this book, which was reprinted many times (in 1757 an epitome was issued28), Meier discusses Æsthetic in several of his numerous works, especially in a little tract, Considerations on the First Principles of all Fine Arts and Sciences.29 Who was more tenderly inclined than he towards the science so recently born and baptized? He was ardent in her defence against those who denied both her possibility and her utility, and against those who admitted these yet complained, not unreasonably, that she was substantially the same as that which in former days had been treated as Poetics and Rhetoric. He parried this accusation, of which he recognized the partial truth, by asserting that it was impossible for one writer to have perfect knowledge of all the arts: another of his excuses was to the effect that Æsthetic was a science too young to show the perfection reached by other sciences after the cultivation of centuries; in one place he says he has no intention of arguing “with those enemies of Æsthetic who will not or cannot see the true nature and aim of this science, but have built for themselves in its place a deformed and miserable image against which, when they fight, they fight against themselves.” With philosophic resignation he concludes that the same fate is in store for Æsthetic as for every science: “At first when almost unknown they encounter enemies and detractors who ridicule them through ignorance and prejudice; but later they meet persons of intellect who, by working at them conjointly, carry them on to their proper perfection.”30

Confusions of Meier.

Students of the new science flocked to Halle University to hear Meier lecture on Æsthetic whose “chief author” or “inventor” (Haupturheber, Erfinder), as Meier never tired of repeating, was “Herr Professor Baumgarten”; at the same time warning them that his own Anfangsgründe were no mere transcription of Baumgarten’s lectures.31 Still, while recognizing the great gifts of Meier as publicity-agent, the facility, clarity and wealth of his eloquence, and his shrewdness in polemic, one cannot altogether deny the justice of the remark upon “Professor Baumgarten of Frankfort and his ape (Affe) Professor Meier of Halle.”32 Every defect of Baumgarten’s Æsthetic reappears accentuated in Meier; the limits of the inferior cognitive faculties, alleged as the domain of poetry and the arts, are laid down by him most strangely. It is curious to note how, for example, he interprets the difference between the confused (æsthetical) and the distinct (logical), and the proposition that beauty disappears when made the object of distinct thought. “The cheeks of a beautiful girl whereon bloom the roses of youth are lovely so long as they are looked at with the naked eye. But let them be examined with a magnifying glass. Where is their beauty? One can hardly believe that such a disgusting surface, scaly, all mounts and hollows, the pores full of dirt, with hairs sprouting here and there, can be the seat of that amorous attraction which subdues the heart.”33 That is described as “æsthetically false” whose truth the inferior faculty is unable to grasp: for example, the theory that bodies are composed of monads.34 Once they have become intelligible to these faculties, general concepts possess great æsthetic richness, since they include infinite consequences and particular cases.35 Æsthetic also comprehends those things which cannot be thought distinctly or, if so thought, might be capable of upsetting philosophic gravity: a kiss may be an excellent subject for a poet; but whatever would be thought of a philosopher who sought to demonstrate its necessity by the mathematical method?36 Moreover, Meier includes the whole theory of observation and experiment in Æsthetic, to which this theory belongs, he says, by right of its connexion with the senses,37 and also the whole theory of the appetitive faculties, because “æsthetic requires not only a fine wit but a noble heart as well.”38 He comes near truth sometimes, when, for example, he observes that the logical form presupposes the æsthetic and that our first concepts are sensitive, later becoming distinct by the help of logic;39 and when he condemns allegory as “among the most decadent forms of beautiful thinking.”40 But, on the other hand, he thinks that logical distinctions and definitions, although not necessarily sought after by genius, are very useful in poetry; they are even indispensable as regulators of beautiful thinking and make up, as it were, the skeleton of the body poetic: great care, however, must be taken not to judge æsthetical general concepts, notiones æstheticæ universales, with the rigorous exactitude demanded by philosophical. And since such concepts, taken singly, may be likened to unstrung jewels, they must be connected by the string of æsthetic judgement and syllogism, the theory of which is identical with that presented by Logic, setting aside that part which is of little or no use to genius, but belongs exclusively to the philosopher.41 In his Considerations of 1757 Meier, having combated the principle of imitation (which appeared to him at once too broad, since science and morals are also imitations of nature, and too narrow, since art does not imitate natural objects solely nor should it imitate them all, for the immoral must be excluded), reaffirmed the thesis that the æsthetic principle consists in the “greatest possible beauty of sense-perception.”42 He upheld this by condemning as erroneous the belief that this sense-perception is wholly sensuous and confused, without any gleam of distinctness or rationality. The perception of sweet, bitter, red, etc., is wholly sensuous; but there is another perception which is both sensuous and intellectual, confused and distinct, in which both faculties, the higher and the lower, collaborate. When intellectuality prevails in this consciousness, then we have science: when sensibility, then we have poetry. “From our explanation it will be gathered that the inferior cognitive faculties must collect all the material of a poem, and all its parts. Intellect and judgement, on the other hand, watch and ensure that these materials are placed side by side in such a way that in their connexion distinction and order may be observed.”43 Here a plunge into sensationalism, there a fugitive glimpse of truth: most often, and in conclusion, an adherence to the old mechanical, ornamental, pedagogic theory of poetry: this is the impression left on us by the æsthetic writings of Meier.

M. Mendelssohn and other followers of Baumgarten. Vogue of Æsthetic.

Another disciple of Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, conceiving beauty as “indistinct image of a perfection,” deduced that God can have no perception of beauty, as this is merely a phenomenon of human imperfection. According to him a primary form of pleasure is that of the senses, arising from “the bettered state of our bodily constitution”; a secondary form is the æsthetic fact of sensible beauty, that is to say, unity in variety; a third form is perfection, or harmony in variety.44 He too repudiates Hutcheson’s deus ex machina, the sense of beauty. Sensible beauty, perfection such as can be apprehended by the senses, is independent of the fact that the object represented is beautiful or ugly, good or bad by nature; it suffices that it leaves us not indifferent: whence Mendelssohn agrees with Baumgarten’s definition, “a poem is a discourse sensibly perfect.”45 Elias Schlegel (1742) conceived art as imitation, not so servile as to seem a copy, but having similarity rather than identity with nature: he considered the duty of poetry was first to please and only afterwards to instruct.46 Treatises on Æsthetic, university lectures or slender volumes for use of the public, Theories of the Fine Arts and Letters, Manuals, Sketches, Texts, Principles, Introductions, Lectures, Essays, and Considerations on Taste poured down thick and fast on Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. There are at least thirty full or complete treatises and many dozens of minor tracts or fragments. After the Protestant universities, the Catholic took up the new science, which was taught by Riedel at Vienna, Herwigh at Würzburg, Ladrone at Mainz, Jacobi at Freiburg, and by others at Ingolstadt after the expulsion of the Jesuits.47 A pretty little volume on the First Principles of the Fine Arts[48] was written (1790) for Catholic schools by the notorious Franciscan friar Eulogius Schneider, who, after being unfrocked, terrorised Strasburg in the days of the Convention, and met his end under the guillotine. The frenzied output of these German Æsthetics resembles that of Poetics in Italy in the sixteenth century, after the rise to popularity of Aristotle’s treatise. Between 1771 and 1774 the Swiss Sulzer brought out his great æsthetic encyclopædia, The General Theory of the Fine Arts, in alphabetical order, with historical notes upon each article, which were greatly enlarged in the second edition of 1792, edited by a retired Prussian captain, von Blankenburg.49 In 1799, one J. Roller published a first Sketch of the History of Æsthetic,50 in which he observes not unjustly, “Patriotic youth will be pleased to recognize that Germany has produced more literature on this subject than any other country.”51

Eberhard and Eschenburg.

Confining ourselves to bare mention of the works of Riedel (1767), Faber (1767), Schütz (1776-1778), Schubart (1777-1781), Westenrieder (1777), Szerdahel (1779), König (1784), Gang (1785), Meiners (1787), Schott (1789), Moritz (1788),52 we will select from the crowd the Theory of Fine Arts and Letters (1783) of Johann August Eberhard, successor to Meier in the Chair at Halle,53 and the Sketch of a Theory and Literature of Letters (1783) by Johann Joachim Eschenburg, one of the most popular books of the day for students.54 Both these authors are followers of Baumgarten, with inclinations towards sensationalism; amongst other things Eberhard considered the beautiful as “that which pleases the most distinct senses,” that is to say, of sight and hearing.

J. G. Sulzer.

A word must be accorded to Sulzer, in whom we find the most curious alternation of new and old, the romantic influence of the new Swiss school and the utilitarianism and intellectualism of his day. He asserts that beauty exists wherever unity, variety and order are found: the work of an artist is strictly in the form, in lively expression (lebhafte Darstellung): the material is irrelevant to art, but the duty of every reasonable and sensible man is to make judicious selection. The beauty which is used to clothe the good as well as the bad is not the ineffable, celestial Beauty, offspring of the alliance between the beautiful, the good and the perfect, which awakens more than mere pleasure, a veritable joy which ravishes and beatifies our soul. Such is the human face when, by filling the eye of the beholder with the pleasure of form arising from the variety, proportion and order of the features, it proceeds to arouse the imagination and intellect by its suggestion of interior perfection; of the same nature is the statue of a great man carved by Phidias, or a patriotic oration by Cicero. If truth lie outside art and belong to philosophy, the most noble use to which art may be put is to make us feel the important truths which lend her strength and energy, not to mention that truth itself enters into art in the shape of truthful imitation or representation. Sulzer also repeats (and he is not the last) that orators, historians and poets are intermediaries between speculative philosophy and the people.55

K. H. Heydenreich.

Karl Heinrich Heydenreich returns to a sounder tradition when he defines art (1790) as “a representation of a determinate state of sensibility,” and observes that man, as a cognitive being, is impelled to enlarge the sphere of his cognitions and impart his discoveries to his fellows, while as a sensitive being he is impelled to represent and communicate his sensations; whence arise science and art. But Heydenreich does not clearly grasp the cognitive character of art; for in his opinion sensations become objects of artistic representation either because they are pleasing or, when not pleasing, because they are useful to further the moral aims of man as a social being; the objects of sensibility which enter into art must be possessed of intrinsic excellence and value and bear reference not to a single individual but to the individual as a rational being: hence the objectivity and necessity of taste. Like Baumgarten and Meier, he divides Æsthetic into three parts: a doctrine of inventio, another of methodica, a third of the ars significandi.56

J. G. Herder.

Another disciple of Baumgarten is J. G. Herder, who had an unbounded admiration for the old Berlin master, whom he calls “the Aristotle of his day,” and defends him warmly against those who think fit to describe him as a “stupid and obtuse syllogizer” (1769). On the other hand he had slight esteem for subsequent Æsthetic, for example Meier’s work, which he stigmatized accurately enough as “in part a re-mastication of Logic, in part a patchwork of metaphorical terms, comparisons and examples.” “O Æsthetic!” he cries with emphasis, “O Æsthetic! the most fertile, the most beautiful and by far the most novel of all abstract sciences, in what cavern of the Muses is sleeping the youth of my philosophic nation destined to bring thee to perfection?”57 He denied Baumgarten’s claim to have established an Ars pulchre cogitandi instead of limiting himself to a simple Scientia de pulchro et pulchris philosophice cogitans, and ridiculed the scruple which held Æsthetic to be unworthy of the dignity of Philosophy.58 To compensate for this, however, he accepted the fundamental definition cf poetry as oratio sensitiva perfecta: gem of definitions (says he), the best that has ever been invented, that penetrates to the heart of the matter, touches the true poetic principles and opens the most extended view over the entire philosophy of the beautiful, “coupling poetry with her sisters, the fine arts.”59 Like Cesarotti the Italian, but with much less vivacity and brilliance, Herder the German had studied primitive poetry, Ossian and the songs of ancient peoples, Shakespeare (1773), popular love-songs (1778), the spirit of Hebrew poetry (1782), and oriental poetry; these studies powerfully impressed upon his mind the sensitive nature of poetry. His friend Hamann (1762) had written these memorable words, which read like an extract from one of Vico’s aphorisms: “Poetry is the mother-tongue of mankind: in the same way that the garden is older than the ploughed field, painting than writing, song than declamation, barter than trade. The repose of our most ancient progenitors was a slumber deeper than ours; their motion a tumultuous dance. They spent seven days in the silence of thought or of stupor; and opened their mouths to pronounce winged words. Their speech was sensation and passion, and they understood nothing but images. Of images is composed all the treasure of human knowledge and felicity.”60 Although Herder, who knew and admired Vico,61 does not mention him by name when treating of language and poetry, one might suppose him to be influenced by the great Neapolitan at least in the final consolidation of his theories; but, on the contrary, the authors whom he chiefly quotes in this connexion are Du Bos, Goguet and Condillac, and observes “the first beginnings of human speech in tone, gesture, expression of sensations and thoughts by means of images and signs, can only have been a kind of crude poetry, and so it is among every savage nation in the world.” Not a speech with punctuation and a sense of syllable, like ours, learning as we do to read and write, but an unsyllabled melody which gave birth to the primitive epic. “Natural man depicts what he sees and as he sees it, alive, powerful, monstrous; in order or disorder, as he sees and hears, so he reproduces. Not alone did barbarous tongues thus arrange their images, but Greek and Latin do the same. As the senses offered material, so the poets utilized it; especially in Homer we see how closely nature is followed in images which glow and fade perpetually and inimitably. He describes things and events line by line, scene by scene; and, in the same way, he paints men in their very bodies, actually as they speak and move.” Later we distinguish epic from what we call history; because the former “not only describes what has happened but describes the event in its entirety, showing how it occurred in the only possible way, having regard to surrounding circumstance of body and spirit”: this is the reason of the more philosophical character of poetry. As for pleasure, no doubt we do find poetry pleasant; but the idea that the poet’s motive is merely to excite pleasure cannot be condemned too strongly. “Homer’s gods were as essential and indispensable to the poet’s world as the forces of motion are to the world of matter. Without the deliberations and activities of Olympus, none of the necessary events which happen on this earth could take place. Homer’s magic island in the western sea belongs to the map of his hero’s wanderings by the same necessity which placed it on the map of the world: it was necessary to the plan of his poem. It is the same with the severe Dante and his circles of Hell and Heaven.” Art is formative: she disciplines, orders and governs the imagination and every faculty of man: not only did she generate history, “but, earlier yet, she created gods and heroes and purified the uncouth imaginations and fables of peoples with their Titans, monsters and Gorgons, reducing to limit and law the riotous imagination of ignorant men which knows no bounds or rule.”62

Notwithstanding these intuitions, so like those of Vico early in the same century, Herder as a philosopher is inferior to his Italian predecessor, and in point of fact does not rise superior to Baumgarten. By application of Leibniz’ law of continuity, he too arrived at the opinion that the pleasing, the true, the beautiful and the good are degrees of one single activity. For instance, sensible pleasure” is a participation in the true and the good, so far as the senses may comprehend them; the feeling of pleasure and pain is no other than the feeling of the true and the good, that is to say, the consciousness that the aim of our organism, the conservation of our well-being and the avoidance of our hurt, has been attained.”63 Fine arts and letters are all instructive (bildend): hence the terms humaniora, the Greek καλόν, the Latin pulchrum, the gentle arts of days of chivalry, les belles lettres et les beaux arts of the French. A group of them (gymnastic, dance, etc.) educates the body; a second group (painting, plastic, music) educates the nobler senses of man, the eye, the ear, the hand and tongue; a third (poetry) touches the intellect, the imagination and the reason: a fourth group governs human tendencies and inclinations.64 Herder disapproved of the facile theorists of art who began straight away with a definition of beauty, a complex and involved concept. He held that the theory of fine arts should be subdivided into three theories, each to be built up from the foundations, the theory of sight, of hearing and of touch, that is to say of painting, music and sculpture, i.e. into æsthetical Optics, æsthetical Acoustics and æsthetical Physiology. “Fairly well elaborated in the psychological and subjective aspects, Æsthetic is sadly undeveloped in all that belongs to the object and to the sensation of beauty, without which there can never be a fertile theory of the Beautiful capable of influencing all the arts.”65 Taste is not “a fundamental faculty of the soul but a habitual application of our judgement (intellectual judgement) to objects of beauty”; an acquired facility of the intellect (of which Herder outlines the genesis).66 The poet is poet not only in his imagination but in his intellect. In 1782 he writes: “The barbarous name Æsthetic of recent invention indicates nothing beyond a section of Logic: that which we call taste is neither more nor less than a quick and rapid judgement which does not exclude truth and profundity, but rather presupposes and promotes them. All didactic poetry is nothing more than philosophy rendered sensible: the fable as exposition of a general doctrine is truth in act, in activity.... When expounded and applied to human affairs, Philosophy is not only a fine art in herself (schöne Wissenschaft,) but the mother of Beauty: it is only through her that Rhetoric and Poetry can ever be educational, useful, or in the truest sense pleasant.”67

Philosophy of language.

Herder and Hamann deserve our gratitude for having brought a current of fresh air into the study of the philosophy of language. The lead given by the Port-Royal authors had been followed since the beginning of the century by many writers of logical or general grammars. According to the French Encyclopædia, “La grammaire générale est la science raisonnée des principes immuables et généraux de la parole prononcée ou écrite dans toutes les langues,”68 and d’Alembert spoke of grammarians of invention and grammarians of memory, assigning to the former the duty of studying the metaphysics of grammar.69 General grammars had been written by Du Marsais, De Beauzée, and Condillac in France; Harris in England; and many others.70 But what was the relation between general grammar and particular grammars? If logic be one, how comes it that languages are many? Is the variety of tongues but a deviation on their part from one single model? And, if there be no such deviation or error, what is the explanation of the fact? What is language, and how was it born? If language be external to thought, how can thought exist if not in language? “Si les hommes,” says Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “ont eu besoin de la parole pour apprendre à penser, ils ont eu bien plus besoin encore de savoir penser pour trouver l’art de la parole”; appalled at the difficulty, he declares his conviction “de l’impossibilité presque démontrée que les langues aient pu naître et s’établir par des moyens purement humains.”71 Such questions became fashionable; books on the origin and formation of language were written by de Brosses (1765) and Court de Gébelin (1776) in France, by Monboddo (1774) in England, Süssmilch (1766) and Tiedemann in Germany, and Cesarotti (1785) in Italy, and by others who had some slight acquaintance with Vico, but profited little by it.72 None of the above-named writers was able to free himself of the notion that speech was either natural and mechanical, or else a symbol attached to thought: whereas in fact it was impossible to solve the difficulties under which they were labouring except by dropping the notion of a sign or symbol and attaining the conception of the active and expressive imagination, verbal imagination, language as the expression not of intellect but of intuition. An approach towards this explanation was made by Herder in a brilliant and imaginative thesis in 1770 upon this subject of the origin of language, chosen for discussion by the Berlin Academy. In it he says that language is the reflexion or consciousness (Besonnenheit) of man. “Man shows reflexion when he puts forth freely such force of mind as enables him to make selection from amongst the crowd of sensations by which he is assailed: from the ocean of the senses, so to speak, to select a single wave and consciously to watch it. He shows reflexion when, amidst the thronging chaos of images which pass before him as in a dream, he can in a waking moment collect himself and fasten his attention upon a single image, examine it calmly and clearly, and separate it from its neighbours. Once again, man shows reflexion when he is able not merely to grasp vividly and clearly all the properties of an image, but also to recognize one or more of its distinctive properties.” The language of man “does not depend on the organization of the mouth, for even he who is dumb from birth has, if he reflects, a language; it is not a cry of the senses, since it resides in a reflective creature, not in a breathing machine; it is not an affair of imitation, since imitation of nature is a means, and we are here trying to explain the end: much less is it an arbitrary convention; a savage in the depths of the forest would have had to create a language for himself even though he never used it. Language is an understanding of the soul with herself, necessary just in so far as man is man.”73 Here language begins to show itself no longer as purely mechanical or as something derived from arbitrary choice and invention, but as a creative activity and a primary affirmation of the activity of the human mind. Herder’s essay may not state such a view unequivocally, but it points forward to such a conclusion in a striking way for which its author has not received the credit he deserves. Hamann, in reviewing his friend’s theories, agreed with him in denying the origin of language by invention or arbitrary choice; while dwelling also on the liberty of man, he regarded language as something which man could only have learned by means of a mystical communicatio idiomatum from God.74 That, too, was one way of recognizing that the mystery of language is not to be solved except by placing it in the forefront of the problem of the spirit.

Notes

1 Vico, Opere, ed. cit. iv. p. 305.

2 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, 1793-1797, Letter 59; Goethe, Italien. Reise, Mar. 5, 1787.

3 Letters from Wolf to Cesarotti, June 5, 1802; in Cesarotti, Opere, vol. xxxviii. pp. 108-112; cf. ibid. pp. 43-44, and vol. xxxvii. pp. 281, 284, 324; cf. on the question of the relations between Wolf and Vico, Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, pp. 51, 56-58, and Supplem. pp. 12-14.

4 Letter in French to Mme. Ferrant (1719), and to the Marquis Maffei in Prose e poesie, vol. ii. (1756), pp. lxxxv.-civ., cviii.-cix.

5 Prose e poesie, vol. i., 1739, pref.

6 Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was an Irishman. Croce’s mistake is probably due to the fact that he studied and taught at Glasgow, or that his family was ultimately of Scottish origin.—TR.

7 Prose e poesie, vol. ii. pp. clxxi.-clxxvii.

8 See above, pp. 184-185.

9 Prose e poesie, vol. ii. pp. 242-246.

10 Op. cit. ii. p. 249.

11 Op. cit. ii. pp. 252-253.

12 Prose e poesie, vol. ii. pp. 233-234.

13 Op. cit. i. pref.

14 Op. cit. ii. p. 127.

15 Op. cit. i. p. xliii.

16 Fr. Sav. Quadrio, Della storia e della ragione d’ ogni poesia, Bologna, 1739, vol. i. part i. dist. i. ch. 1.

17 Fr. M. Zanotti, Dell’ arte poetica, ragionamenti cinque, Bologna, 1768.

18 On Ossian, Opere, vols, ii.-v.; on Homer, vols, vi.-x.; Saggio copra il diletto della tragedia, vol. xxix. pp. 117-167; Saggio sul bello, vol. xxx. pp. 13-70; on Filosofia del gusto, vol. i.; on Eloquenza, lecture, vol. xxxi.

19 Opere, vol. xl. p. 49.

20 Ibid. p. 55.

21 Letter from Corniani to Cesarotti, November 21, 1790, in Opere, vol. xxxvii. p. 146.

22 Saggio sopra le istituzioni scolastiche, private e pubbliche, in Opere, vol. xxix. pp. 1-116.

23 Letter of March 30, 1764, in Opere, vol. xxxv. p. 202.

24 Saverio Bettinelli, Dell’ entusiasmo nelle belle arti, 1769, in Opere, iii. pp. xi.-xiii.

25 Fr. M. Pagano, De’ saggi politici, Naples, 1783-1785, vol. i. Appendix to § 1, “Sull’ origine e natura della poesia”; vol. ii. § 6, “Del gusto e delle belle arti.”

26 See above, p. 217.

27 Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften, Halle, 1748-1750.

28 Auszug aus den Anfangsgründe, etc., ibid. 1758.

29 Betrachtungen über den ersten Grundsätzen aller schönen Künste u. Wissenschaften, ibid. 1757.

30 Preface to 2nd ed. (1768) of vol. ii. of Anfangsgründe, and Betrachtungen, cit., esp. §§ 1, 2, 34.

31 Preface to vol. i., and cf. § 5.

32 In a letter to Gottsched, 1747, in Danzel, Gottsched, p. 215.

33 Anfangsgründe, § 23.

34 Op. cit. § 92.

35 Op. cit. § 49.

36 Op. cit. § 55.

37 Op. cit. §§ 355-370.

38 Op. cit. §§ 529-540.

39 Op. cit. § 5.

40 Op. cit. § 413.

41 Anfangsgründe, §§ 541-670.

42 Betrachtungen, § 20.

43 Op. cit. § 21.

44 Briefe über die Empfindungen, 1755 (in Opere filosofiche, Ital. trans., Parma, 1800, vol. ii.). Letters 2, 5, 11.

45 Betrachtungen üb. d. Quellen d. sch. Wiss. u. K., 1757, later entitled Über die Hauptgrundsätze, etc., 1761, in Opere, ed. cit. ii. pp. 10, 12-15, 21-30.

46 J. E. Schlegel, Von der Nachahmung, 1742; cf. Braitmaier, Gesch. d. poet. Th. i. p. 249 sqq.

47 Koller, Entwurf, p. 103.

48 Die ersten Grundsätze der schönen Kunst überhaupt, und der schönen Schreibart insbesondere, Bonn, 1790; cf. Sulzer, i. p. 55, and Koller, pp. 55-56.

49 See Bibliographical Appendix.

50 Entwurf zur Geschichte u. Literatur d. Ästhetik, etc., Regensburg. 1799; see Bibl. App.

51 Koller, op. cit. p. 7.

52 Notices and extracts in Sulzer and Koller, opp. citt.

53 Joh. Aug. Eberhard, Theorie der schönen Künste u. Wissenschaften, Halle, 1783; reprinted 1789, 1790.

54 Joh. Joach. Eschenburg, Entwurf einer Theorie u. Literatur d. s. W., Berlin, 1783; reprinted 1789.

55 Allgem. Th. d. sch. Künste, on words Schön, Schönheit, Wahrheit, Werke des Geschmacks, etc.

56 Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, System der Ästhetik, vol. i., Leipzig, 1790, esp. pp. 149-154. 367-385. 385-392.

57 Kritische Wälder oder Betrachtungen über die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen, Fourth Forest, 1769, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, Berlin, 1878, vol. iv. pp. 19, 21, 27.

58 Kritische Wälder, loc. cit. pp. 22-27.

59 Fragment, Von Baumgarten Denkart; and cf. op. cit. pp. 132-133.

60 Æsthetica in mice, in Kreuzzüge des Philologen, Königsberg, quoted in Herder, Werke, xii. 145.

61 See above, p. 235.

62 Kaligone, 1800, in Werke, ed. cit., xii. pp. 145-150.

63 Kaligone, pp. 34-55.

64 Ibid. pp. 308-317.

65 Kritische Wälder, loc. cit. iv. pp. 47-127.

66 Op. cit. pp. 27-36.

67 Sophron, 1782, § 4.

68 Encyclopédie, ad verb.

69 Éloge de Du Marsais, 1756 (introd. to Œuvres de Du Marsais, Paris, 1797, vol. i.).

70 Du Marsais, Méthode raisonnée, 1722; Traité des tropes, 1730; Traité de grammaire générale (in Encyclopédie); De Beauzée, Grammaire générale pour servir de fondement à l’étude de toutes les langues, 1767; Condillac, Grammaire française, 1755; J. Harris, Hermes, or a Philosophical Enquiry concerning Language and Universal Grammar, 1751.

71 Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1754.

72 De Brosses, Traité de la formation mécanique des langues, 1765; Court de Gébelin, Histoire naturelle de la parole, 1776; Monboddo, Origin and Progress of Language, 1774; Süssmilch, Beweis dass der Ursprung der menschlichen Sprache göttlich sei, 1766; Tiedemann, Ursprung der Sprache; Cesarotti, Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, 1785 (in Opere, vol. i.); D. Colao Agata, Piano, ovvero ricerche filosofiche sulle lingue, 1774; Soave, Ricerche intorno all’ istituzione naturale d’una società e d’una lingua, 1774.

73 Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, in a small book Zwei Preisschriften, etc. (2nd ed., Berlin, 1789), esp. pp. 60-65.

74 Steinthal, Ursprung der Sprache, 4th ed., pp. 39-58.
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