Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

XIV — Æsthetic in France, England and Italy During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Æsthetic movement in France: Cousin, Jouffroy.

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century German thought, notwithstanding the glaring errors which vitiated it, and were soon to bring about a violent and indeed exaggerated reaction, must on the whole be awarded the foremost place in the general history of European thought as well as in the individual study of Æsthetic, the contemporary philosophy of other countries standing on an inferior level of the second and third degree. France still lay under the dominion of the sensationalism of Condillac and, at the opening of the century, was quite incapable of grasping the spiritual activity of art. A faint gleam of Winckelmann’s abstract spiritualism just appears in the theories of Quatremère de Quincy, who, in criticism of Émeric-David (in his turn a critic of ideal beauty and an adherent of the imitation of nature),1 maintained that the arts of design have pure beauty, devoid of individual character, as their objective; they depict man and not; men.2 Some sensationalists, such as Bonstetten, vainly endeavoured to trace the peculiar processes of imagination in life and in art.[3] Followers of the orthodox spiritualism of the French universities date the beginning of a new era, and the foundation of Æsthetic in France, to 1818, the year when Victor Cousin first delivered at the Sorbonne his lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good, which later formed his book with the same name, frequently reprinted.4 These lectures of Cousin are but poor stuff, although some scraps of Kant are to be found in them here and there; he denies the identity of the beautiful with the pleasant or useful, and substitutes the affirmation of a threefold beauty, physical, intellectual and moral, the last being the true ideal beauty, having its foundations in God; he says that art expresses ideal Beauty, the infinite, God, that genius is the power of creation, and that taste is a mixture of fancy, sentiment and reason.5 Academic phrases all of them; pompous and void and, for that very reason, well received. Of much greater value were the lectures on Æsthetic delivered by Théodore Jouffroy in 1822, before a small audience, and published posthumously in 1843.6 Jouffroy allowed a beauty of expression, to be found alike in art and nature: a beauty of imitation, consisting in the perfect accuracy with which a model is reproduced: a beauty of idealisation, which reproduces the model, accentuating a particular quality in order to give it greater significance: and, finally, a beauty of the invisible or of content, reducible to force (physical, sensible, intellectual, moral), which, as force, awakens sympathy. Ugliness is the negation of this sympathetic beauty; its species or modifications are the sublime and the graceful. One sees that Jouffroy did not succeed in isolating the strictly æsthetic fact in his analysis and gave, instead of a scientific system, little beyond explanations of the use of words. He could not see or understand that expression, imitation and idealization are identical with each other and with artistic activity. Moreover he had many curious ideas, chiefly concerning expression. He said that if we were to see a drunkard with all the most disgusting symptoms of intoxication on a road where there was also an unhewn rock, we should be pleased by the drunken man, since he had expression, and not by the rock, since it had none. Beside Jouffroy, whose theories, crude and immature though they be, reveal an inquiring mind, it is hardly worth while to cite Lamennais,7 who like Cousin regarded art as the manifestation of the infinite through the finite, of the absolute through the relative. French Romanticism in de Bonald, de Barante and Mme. de Staël had defined literature as “the expression of society,” had honoured, under German influence, the characteristic and the grotesque,8 and had proclaimed the independence of art by means of the formula “art for art’s sake”; but these vague affirmations or aphorisms did not supersede, philosophically speaking, the old doctrine of the “imitation of nature.”

English Æsthetic.

In England associationistic psychology still flourished (and has continued to flourish uninterruptedly), unable to emancipate itself wholly from sensationalism or to understand imagination. Dugald Stewart9 had recourse to the wretched expedient of establishing two forms of association: one of accidental associations, the other of associations innate in human nature and therefore common to all mankind. England did not escape German influence, as appears, for example, in Coleridge, to whom we owe a saner concept of poetry and the difference between it and science10 (in collaboration with the poet Wordsworth), and in Carlyle, who placed intellect lower than imagination, “organ of the Divine.” The most noteworthy English æsthetic essay of this period is the Defence of Poetry by Shelley (1821),11 containing profound, if not very systematic, views on the distinctions between reason and imagination, prose and poetry; on primitive language and the faculty of poetic objectification which enshrines and preserves “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”

Italian Æsthetic.

In Italy, where neither Parini nor Foscolo12 had been able to shake off the fetters of the old doctrines (although the latter, in his later writings, was in several ways an innovator in literary criticism), many treatises and essays on Æsthetic were published during the earlier decades of the century, the greater part showing the influence of Condillac’s sensationalism, which had a great vogue in Italy. Such authors as Delfico, Malaspina, Cicognara, Talia, Pasquali, Visconti and Bonacci belong more exclusively to the special, or rather, the anecdotal, history of Italian philosophy. Now and then, however, one comes across remarks that are not wholly contemptible, as in Melchiorre Delfico (1818) who, after wandering aimlessly hither and thither, fixes on the principle of expression, observing, “If it were possible to establish that expression is always an element in the beautiful, it would be a legitimate inference to regard it as the real characteristic of beauty, i.e. a condition without which the beautiful could not exist, and the pleasing modification which arouses the sentiment of beauty could not take place in us”; he tries to develop this principle by asserting that all other characters (order, harmony, proportion, symmetry, simplicity, unity and variety) have significance only by their subordination to the principle of expression.13 In opposition to Malaspina’s definition of beauty as “pleasure born of a representation”; and in opposition to the then fashionable threefold division of beauty into sensible, moral and intellectual, a critic of Malaspina observed that if beauty be representation, it is inconceivable that there should be intellectual beauty, which would be intelligible but not presentable.14 Nor must Pasquale Balestrieri be forgotten; he was a student of medicine who in 1847 tried to construct an Æsthetic of an exact or mathematical kind, with neither better nor worse result than many famous authors in other countries. He noticed, while turning his algebraical expressions into numerals, that such general formulæ “fulfil their object with an infinite number of systems of different ciphers”; and that in art there is an element “not arbitrary, but unknown.”15 Works by German authors were frequently translated at this time, some of them, for example the writings of the two Schlegels, being reprinted several times; the Æsthetic of Bouterweck, deriving from Kant and Schiller,16 was read and discussed; Colecchi gave an excellent statement of the æsthetic doctrines of Kant;17 and in 1831 a certain Lichtenthal adapted the Æsthetic of Franz Ficker18 to the use of Italian readers; later the same book was fully translated by another hand; some of Schelling’s writings were translated, e.g. his discourses on the relation between figurative art and nature.

Rosmini and Gioberti.

It must be admitted that in Italy Æsthetic received but inadequate treatment in the revival of philosophical speculation effected by the work of Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti. It is treated in a merely incidental and popular manner by the first named.19 Rosmini devotes a section of his philosophical system to the deontological sciences, which “treat of the perfection of being, and the method of acquiring or producing such perfection or losing it”; among these sciences is that of “beauty in the universal” under the name of Callology, of which a special part is Æsthetic, the science of “beauty in the sensible,” establishing the “archetypes of beings.”20 In his longest literary work, considered by him as his Æsthetic,21 his essay on The Idyl,22 Rosmini declares the aim of art to be neither imitation of nature nor direct intuition of the archetypes, but the reduction of natural things to their archetypes, which are arranged in a hierarchy of three ideals, natural, intellectual and moral. Gioberti23 is clearly under the influence of German idealism, especially of Schelling’s; for him the beautiful is “the individual union of an intelligible type with an imaginative element called into being by fancy”; the phantasm gives material, while the intelligible type (concept) gives form, in the Aristotelian sense,24 and since the ideal element predominates over the sensible or fantastic, art is a propædeutic to the true and the good. Gioberti is of opinion that Hegel was wrong in detaching natural beauty from Æsthetic, for perfect beauty of nature is “the full correspondence of sensible reality with the Idea which informs and represents it,” and as such “makes its appearance in the sensible universe during the second period of the primordial age described in detail by Moses in the six days of creation”; it is only through original sin that imperfection and ugliness arose in nature.25 Art is nothing but a supplement to natural beauty, whose decadence it presupposes, and thus art is at once record and prophecy, referring to the first and last ages of the world. The Last Judgement will reintroduce perfect beauty: “organic restitution, by empowering the faculties to contemplate the intelligible in the sensible, and by refining their capabilities, will greatly intensify and purify æsthetic enjoyment. The contemplation of perfect beauty will be the beatitude of imagination, of which Christ gave an ineffable foretaste by appearing to his disciples visibly transfigured and shining with celestial radiance.”26 Gioberti agrees with Schelling’s division of art into pagan and Christian, a “heterodox beauty” (Oriental and Græco-Italian art), imperfect when compared with “orthodox beauty”; and between the two, a “semi-orthodox” beauty,27 transitional to Christian art; he also attempted a doctrine of modifications of the beautiful, wherein he held the sublime to be creator of the beautiful. Beauty is the relative intelligibility of created things apprehended by fancy: the sublime is the absolute intelligibility of time, space and infinite power as presented to itself by the faculty of imagination: “The ideal formula: the Being creates the Existing, translated into æsthetic language, gives the following formula: by means of the dynamical sublime Being creates the beautiful; and by means of the mathematical sublime contains it: this shows the ontological and psychological connexions of Æsthetic in First Science.” Ugliness enters into the beautiful either as relief and counterpoise, or to open a way to the comic, or to depict the struggle between good and evil. The Christian ideal of artistic beauty is the figure of the God-Man, absolute union of the two forms of beauty, the sublime and the beautiful, a transfigured and divinely illuminated expression of man.28 However carefully we sift the thoughts of Gioberti from their mythological Judaico-Christian husk, we find nothing of the least value to science.

Italian Romantics. Dependence of Art.

On the other hand, if Italian literature of the day chose to revive and refurbish certain antiquated critical ideas, a much wider field was opened by social and political upheavals which tended to make use of literature as a practical instrument for spreading abroad the truths of history, science, religion and morality. In 1816 Giovanni Berchet wrote that “poetry... is intended to improve the habits of man and satisfy the cravings of his imagination and heart, since the tendency towards poetry, like every other desire, awakens in us moral needs”;29 and Ermes Visconti in his Conciliatore of 1818 says that æsthetic aims must be subordinated “to the improvement of mankind and public and private weal, the eminent aim of all studies.” Manzoni, who subsequently took to philosophizing on art on the principles of Rosmini, declared in his letter on Romanticism (1823) that “poetry or literature in general should have utility as its objective, truth as its subject and interest as its means”;30 and though noticing the vagueness of the concept of truth in poetry, he inclined always (as is seen also in his discourse on the historical novel) to its identification with historical and scientific truth.31 Pietro Maroncelli proposed as a substitute for the classic formula of art, “founded on imitation of the real and having pleasure as its object,” a formula of art as “founded on inspiration, having the beautiful as means and good as end”; this doctrine he baptized “cormentalism,” contrasting it with the doctrine of art for art’s sake found in the writings of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Victor Hugo.32 Tommaseo defined beauty as “the union of many truths in one concept” effected by the power of feeling.33 Giuseppe Mazzini, too, always conceived literature as the mediator of the universal idea or intellectual concept.34 Attempting to restore serious content to a literature grown weak and frivolous, the Italian Romantics found themselves forced on the theoretical side, by a natural reaction, into constant and perpetual opposition to every tendency of thought likely to affirm the independence of art.

Notes

1 Émeric-David, Recherches sur l’art du statuaire chez les anciens, Paris, 1805 (Ital. trans., Florence, 1857).

2 Quatremère de Quincy, Essai sur l’imitation dans les beaux arts, 1823.

3 Recherches sur la nature et les lois de l’imagination, 1807.

4 Du vrai, du beau et du bien, 1818, many lines revised (23rd ed. Paris, 1881).

5 Op. cit. lectures 6-8.

6 Cours d’ esthétique, ed. Damiron, Paris, 1843.

7 De l’art et du beau, 1843-1846.

8 Victor Hugo, Preface to Cromwell, 1827.

9 Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1837.

10 Gayley-Scott, An Introd. pp. 305-306.

11 P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (in Works, London, 1880, vol. vii.)

12 Parini, Principi delle belle lettere applicati alle belle arti, from 1773 onward; Foscolo, Dell’ origine e dell’ uffizio della letteratura, 1809, and Saggi di critica, composed in England.

13 M. Delfico, Nuove ricerche sul bello, Naples, 1818, ch. 9.

14 Malaspina, Delle leggi del bello, Milan, 1828, pp. 26, 233.

15 P. Balestrieri, Fondamenti di estetica, Naples, 1847.

16 Friedrich Bouterweck, Ästhetik, 1806, 1815 (3rd ed., Göttingen, 1824-1825).

17 O. Colecchi, Questions filosofiche, vol. iii., Naples, 1843.

18 P. Lichtenthal, Estetica ossia dottrina del bello e delle arti belle, Milan, 1831.

19 Elementi di filosofia (5th ed., Naples, 1846), vol. ii. pp. 427-476.

20 Sistema filosofico, by A. Rosmini-Serbati, Turin, 1886, § 210.

21 Cf. Nuovo saggio sopra l’ orig. delle idee, § v. part iv. ch. 5.

22 Sull’ idillio e sulla nuova letteratura italiana (opuscoli filosofici, vol. i.).

23 V. Gioberti, Del buono e del bello (Florence ed., 1857).

24 Del bello, ch. 1.

25 Op. cit. ch. 7.

26 Op. cit. ch. 7.

27 Del bello, chs. 8-10.

28 Op. cit. ch. 4.

29 G. Berchet, Opere, ed. Cusani, Milan, 1863, p. 227.

30 Words suppressed in ed. of 1870.

31 Epistolario, ed. Sforza, i. pp. 285, 306, 308; Discorso sul romanzo storico, 1845; Dell’ invenzione, dialogue.

32 Addizioni alle Miei Prigioni, 1831 (in Pellico, Prose, Florence, 1858); see pp. about the Conciliatore.

33 Del bello e del sublime, 1827; Studî filosofici (Venice, 1840), vol. ii. part v.

34 Cf. De Sanctis, Lett. Hal. nel s. XIX, ed. Croce, Naples 1896, pp. 427-431. ⁂