Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

II History of the Artistic and Literary Kinds

The kinds in antiquity. Aristotle.

The theory of artistic and literary kinds and of the laws or rules proper to each separate kind has almost always followed the fortunes of the rhetorical theory.

Traces of the threefold division into epic, lyric and dramatic are found in Plato; and Aristophanes gives an example of criticism according to the canon of the kinds, particularly that of tragedy.1 But the most conspicuous theoretical treatment of the kinds bequeathed us by antiquity is precisely the doctrine of Tragedy which forms a large part of the Aristotelian fragment known as the Poetics. Aristotle defines such a composition as an imitation of a serious and complete action, having size, in language adorned in accordance with the requirements of the different parts, its exposition to be by action and not by narration, and using pity or terror as means to free or purify us from these same passions;2 he gives minute details as to the six parts of which it is composed, especially the plot and the tragic character. It has been often said, ever since the days of Vincenzo Maggio in the sixteenth century, that Aristotle treated of the nature of poetry, or particular forms of poetry, without claiming to give precepts. But Piccolomini answered that “all these things and other similar ones are shown or asserted with no other purpose but that we may see in what way their precepts and laws must be obeyed and carried out,” just as, to make a hammer or saw, one begins by describing the parts of which they are composed.3 The error of which we take Aristotle as representative lies in transmuting abstractions and empirical partitions into rational concepts: this was almost inevitable at the beginnings of æsthetic reflexion, and the Sanskrit theory of poetry employed the same method independently when, for example, it defines and legislates for ten principal and eighteen secondary styles of drama; forty-eight varieties of hero; and we know not how many kinds of heroines.4

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance .

After Aristotle, the theory of poetic kinds does not seem to have been completely or elaborately developed in antiquity. The Middle Ages may be said to have expressed the doctrine in treatises of the kind known as “rhythmic arts” or “methods of composition.” When the Aristotelian fragment was first noticed, it is curious to see the way in which the paraphrase of Averroes distorted the theory of kinds. Averroes conceives tragedy as the art of praise, comedy as that of blame, which amounts to identifying the former with panegyric, the latter with satire; and he believes the peripeteia to be the same thing as antithesis, or the artifice of beginning the description of a thing by describing its opposite.5 This distortion demonstrates afresh the merely historical character of these kinds and their unintelligibility by the methods of pure logic to a thinker living in times and under customs different from those of the Hellenic world. The Renaissance seized upon Aristotle’s text, partly expounded it, partly distorted it and partly thought it out afresh, and thus succeeded in establishing a long list of kinds and sub-kinds rigidly defined and subjected to inexorable laws. Controversy now began over the correct understanding of the unities of epic or dramatic poetry; over the moral quality and social standing proper to the characters in this kind of poem and in that; over the nature of the plot, and whether it includes passions and thoughts, and whether lyrics should or should not be received as true poetry; whether the material of tragedy should be historical; whether the dialogue of comedy may be in prose; whether a happy ending may be allowed in tragedy; whether the tragic character may be a perfect gentleman; what kind and number of episodes is admissible in the poem, and how they should be incorporated in the main plot; and so on. Great anguish was caused by the mysterious rule of catharsis found in black and white in Aristotle’s text, and Segni naïvely predicted that tragic poetry would be revived in its perfect spectacular entirety for the sake of experiencing the effect spoken of by Aristotle, that “purgation” which causes “the birth of tranquillity in the soul and of freedom of all perturbation.”6

The doctrine of the three unities.

Amongst the many undertakings brought to a glorious end by the critics and treatise-writers of the sixteenth century, the best known is the establishment of the three unities of time, place and action. One cannot indeed see why they are called unities, for in strictness they could at most be spoken of as shortness of time, straitness of space and limitation of tragic subjects to a certain class of action. It is well known that Aristotle prescribed unity of action only, and reminded his hearers that theatrical custom alone imposed on the action a time-limit of one day. On this last point the critics of the sixteenth century accorded six, eight, or twelve hours according to individual taste or humour: some of them (amongst them Segni) allowed twenty-four hours, including the night as particularly propitious to assassinations and the other acts of violence which usually form the plot of tragedies; others extended the limit to thirty-six or forty-eight hours. The last, and most curious, unity, that of place, was slowly developed by Castelvetro, Riccoboni and Scaliger until the Frenchman Jean de la Taille joined it as a third to the existing two in 1572, and in 1598 Angelo Ingegneri finally formulated it more explicitly.

Poetics of the kinds and rules. Scaliger.

The Italian treatises were widely read and regarded as authoritative all over Europe, and awakened the first effort towards a learned theory of poetry in France, Spain. England and Germany. A good representative of his class is Julius Cæsar Scaliger, who has been considered, with some exaggeration, as the true founder of French pseudo-classicism or neo-classicism; as one who (it has been said) “laid the first stone of the classical Bastille.” But if he was neither the first nor the only one, he certainly helped greatly to reduce “to a system of doctrines the principal consequences of the sovranty of Reason in works of literature,” with his minute distinctions and classifications of kinds, the insurmountable barriers he erected between them, and his distrust of free inspiration and imagination.7 Scaliger numbers among his descendants (beside Daniel Heinsius) d’Aubignac, Rapin, Dacier and other tyrants of French literature and drama: Boileau turned the rules of neo-classicism into neat verses.

Lessing.

It has been noticed that Lessing entered the same field; his opposition to the French rules (which was an opposition of rule to rule, in which he had been forestalled by Italian writers, for example by Calepio in 1732) is anything but radical. Lessing maintained that Corneille and other authors had misinterpreted Aristotle, to whose laws even the Shakespearian drama could be shown to conform;8 but on the other hand he strongly opposed the abolition of all rules and those who shouted “genius, genius,” placing genius above the law and saying that genius makes the law. For the very reason that genius is law, replied Lessing, laws have their value and can be determined: negation of them would entail the confinement of genius to its first trial flights, making example or practice useless.9

Compromises and extensions.

But the “kinds” and their “limits” could be maintained for centuries solely by means of infinitely subtle interpretations, analogical extensions and more or less concealed compromises. The Italian Renaissance critics, while working at their Poetics in the style of Aristotle, found themselves confronted with chivalric poetry, and had to make the best of it; this they did by assigning it to a kind of poem not foreseen by antiquity (Giraldi Cintio).10 Here and there indeed a rigorist was heard protesting that romances were in no way different from heroic poetry, and were only “badly written heroics” (Salviati). And since it was impossible to deny a place in Italian literature to Dante’s poem, Iacopo Mazzoni, in his Defence of Dante, overhauled once more the categories of Poetics in order to find a niche for the sacred poem.11 Farces made their appearance at this time, and Cecchi (1585) declares “Farce is a third novelty, occupying a place between tragedy and comedy...”12 The Pastor fido of Guarini was published, neither tragedy nor comedy, but tragicomedy; and discovering no heading among the kinds deduced from moral or civil philosophy suitable for the intruder, Jason de Nores proceeded to rule it out of existence; Guarini made a valiant defence and claimed special protection for his beloved Pastor under a third, or mixed, style, representative of real life.13 Another rigorist, Fioretti (Udeno Nisieli) proclaimed the poem “a poetic monster, so huge and deformed that centaurs, hippogriffs and chimæras are comparatively graceful and charming..., fit to bring a blush to the cheek of the muse, a disgrace to poetry, a mixture of ingredients in themselves discordant, inimical and incompatible”;14 but will this bluster drive the delicious Pastor fido from the hands of lovers of poetry? The same thing occurred in the case of Marino’s Adone, described by Chapelain as “a poem of peace” for want of a better definition, though other supporters called it “a new form of epic poem”;15 and the same thing happened again in the case of the comedy of art and musical drama. Corneille, who had called down a furious tempest from Scudéry and the Academicians on the head of his Cid, remarked in his discourse on Tragedy, though basing his position on that of Aristotle, that there was necessity for “quelque modération, quelque favorable interprétation,... pour n’être pas obligés de condamner beaucoup de poèmes, que nous avons vu réussir sur nos théâtres.” “Il est aisé de nous accommoder avec Aristote...”16 he says in another place: a piece of literary hypocrisy which startles by its verbal resemblance to “les accommodements avec le Ciel” of the Tartuffian ethics. The following century saw the accepted kinds augmented by “bourgeois tragedy” and pathetic comedy, nicknamed “lachrymose” by its enemies; de Chassiron17 attacked, and Diderot, Gellert and Lessing18 defended the new arrival. In this way the schematism of the kinds continued to suffer violence and to cut a very poor figure; nevertheless, in spite of adversity, it made every effort to retain power even at the sacrifice of dignity: just as an absolute king turns constitutional by force of circumstance, and chooses the lesser evil of squaring his divine right with the will of the nation.

Rebellion against rules in general.

This retention of power would have been more difficult had any success attended the attempts at rebellion against all laws, against law in general, which broke out in varying degrees at the end of the sixteenth century. Pietro Aretino made mock of the most sacred precepts: in a prologue to one of his comedies he remarks derisively, “If you see more than five characters on the stage at once, do not laugh; for chains which would fasten water-mills to the river could not hold the fools of to-day.”19

G. Bruno. Guarini.

A philosopher, Giordano Bruno, entered the lists against the “regulators of poetry”: rules, said he, are derived from poetry: “there are as many genera and species of true rules as there are genera and species of true poets”; such an individualization of kinds dealt them a deathblow. “How then” (asks the interlocutory opponent) “shall veritable poets be recognized?” “By their singing of verse” (answers Bruno); “of that which, being sung, either delights or instructs, or delights and instructs at the same time.”20 In much the same way Guarini defended his Pastor fido in 1588, declaring “the world is the judge of poets; against its sentence there is no appeal.”21

Spanish critics.

Amongst European countries, Spain was perhaps the sturdiest in her resistance to the pedantic theories of the writers of treatises; Spain was the land of freedom in criticism from Vives to Feijóo, from the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century when decadence of the old Spanish spirit allowed Luzán, with others, to introduce neo-classical poetry of Italian and French origin.22 That rules must change with the times and with actual conditions; that modern literature demands modern poetics; that work carried out contrary to established rule does not signify that it is contrary to all rule or unwilling to submit itself to a higher law; that nature should give, not receive, laws; that the laws of the three unities are as ridiculous as it would be to forbid a painter to paint a large landscape in a small picture; that the pleasure, taste, approbation of readers and spectators are the deciding element in the long run; that notwithstanding the laws of counterpoint, the ear is the true judge of music; these affirmations and many like them are frequent in Spanish criticism of the period. One critic, Francisco de la Barreda (1622), went so far as to compassionate the strong wits of Italy bound by fear and cowardice (temerosos y acobardados) to rules that hampered them on every side;23 he may have been thinking of Tasso, a memorable case of such degradation. Lope de Vega wavered between neglect of rules in practice, and obsequious acceptance of them in theory, alleging in excuse for his conduct that he was forced to yield to the demands of the public who paid money to see his plays; he said, “when I write my comedies, I lock and double-lock the door against the precept-mongers, that they may not rise up and bear witness against me”; “Art (that is, Poetics) speaks truth which is contradicted by the vulgar ignorant”; “may the rules forgive us when we are induced to violate them.”24 But a contemporary admirer of Lope’s work writes of him that “en muchas partes de sus escritos dice que el no guardar el arte antiguo lo hace por conformarse con el gusto de la plebe... dicelo por su natural modestia, y porqué no atribuya la malicia ignorante à arrogancia lo que es politica perfeccion.”25

G. B. Marino.

Giambattista Marino also protested “I assert that I have a more thorough knowledge of the rules than have all the pedants in the world; but the only true rule is to know how to break the rules at the right place and time, and to conform with the custom and taste of the day.”26 The drama of Spain, the comedy of art, and other literary novelties of the seventeenth century caused Minturno, Castelvetro and other rigid treatise-writers of the preceding century to be looked at with contemptuous pity as “antiquaries”; this may be seen in Andrea Perucci (1699), the theorist of improvised comedy.27 Pallavicino criticized the writers on “the disciplines of beautiful speech” on the ground that they “generally base their precepts on observing by experience what things in writers give pleasure, rather than pointing out what would naturally conform to the particular affections and instincts implanted by the Creator in the souls of men.”28

G. V. Gravina.

A note of distrust towards the fixed kinds may be heard in the Discorso sull’ Endimione (1691), wherein Gravina severely blames the “ambitious and miserly precepts” of rhetoricians, and makes the penetrating comment: “No work can see the fight without finding itself confronted by a tribunal of critics specially convened to examine it, and questioned firstly as to its name and nature. Next begins the action which lawyers call prejudicial, and controversy arises as to its status, whether it is a poem, a romance, a tragedy, a comedy, or another of the prescribed kinds. And if the said work have ignored the slightest precept... they decree forthwith its exile and perpetual banishment. And yet, however they recast and expand their aphorisms, they will never be able to include all the different kinds that can be freshly created by the varied and ceaseless motion of human wit. For this reason I cannot see why we should not free ourselves from this insolent curb on the soaring grandeur of our imaginations, and allow them to follow an open road amongst those immeasurable spaces they are fitted to explore.” He remarks on the work of Guidi which forms the subject of his discourse, “I know not whether it be tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, or anything else invented by rhetoricians. It is a representation of the loves of Endymion and Diana. If those terms have sufficient breadth of extension, they will comprehend this work; if they have not, let another be framed (a power which may be granted to any one in so unimportant a matter); if no such term can be invented, let us not, for want of a word, deprive ourselves of a thing so beautiful.”29 These remarks have quite a modern ring, but Gravina can hardly have thought out their implications very deeply, for later on he wrote a special treatise on the rules of the tragic kind.30 Antonio Conti too declared at times his antagonism towards the rules, but he referred to the Aristotelian rules only.31

Fr. Montani.

More courage was displayed by Count Francesco Montani of Pesaro in the polemic roused by Orsi’s book against Bouhours; in 1705 he wrote: “I know that there are immutable and eternal rules, founded on such sound good sense and solid reason as will remain unshaken as long as mankind lives. But these rules, whose incorruptibility gives them authority to guide our spirits to the end of time, are rare enough to be counted with the nose, and it seems to me somewhat arbitrary to claim to test and regulate our new works by old laws now wholly abrogated and annulled.”32

Critics of the eighteenth century.

In France the rigorism of Boileau was followed by the rebellion of Du Bos, who unhesitatingly declared that “men will always prefer poetry which moves them to that composed according to rule,”33 and the like heresies. In 1730, De la Motte made war against the unities of time and place, asserting as the most general, and even superior to that of action, the unity of interest.34 Batteux tended to make free with the rules; and Voltaire, though he opposed De la Motte and declared the three unities to be the “three great laws of good sense,” uttered some bold sentiments in his Essay on Epic Poetry, and it was he who remarked that “tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux,” and that the best kind is “celui qui est le mieux traité.” Diderot was in certain respects a forerunner of Romanticism, and with him must be mentioned Friedrich Melchior Grimm, who was influenced by him. A breath of liberty was wafted into Italy by Metastasio, Bettinelli, Baretti and Cesarotti: in 1766 Buonafede notes in his Epistola della libertà poetica that when erudite persons “define epic poetry, or comedy, or odes, they ought to frame as many definitions as there are compositions and authors.”35 In Germany the first to rise in rebellion against the rules (opposing Gottsched and his disciples) were the representatives of the Swiss school.36 In England, after examining the definitions by which critics endeavoured to distinguish epic poetry from other compositions, Home wrote, “It affords no little diversion to watch so many profound critics hunting after that which does not exist. They presuppose—without shadow of proof—that there exists a precise criterion by which to distinguish epic poetry from all other kinds of composition. But literary compositions melt one into another like colours: and if in their stronger shades it is easy to recognize them, they are susceptible of such variety and of so many different forms that it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins.”37

Romanticism and the “strict kinds”: Berchet, V. Hugo.

Literary thought between the late eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, that is to say from” the period of genius” to that of romanticism properly so called, rose in rebellion against separate individual rules and against all rules as such. But to describe the battles fought, and their more important episodes; to recount the names of captains victorious or discomfited, or to deplore the excesses committed by the conquerors, is no part of our present task. Upon the ruins of the strict kinds, the “genres tranchés” beloved by Napoleon38 (a Romanticist in the art of war, but a Classicist in poetry), flourished the drama, the romance and every other mixed kind: upon the ruins of the three unities, flourished the unity of ensemble. Italy made her protest against rules of style in Berchet’s famous Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo (1816); and France made hers somewhat later in Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell (1827). Henceforth men discussed not the kinds, but Art. What is the unity of ensemble but the demand of art itself, which is always an ensemble, a synthesis? What else is the principle, introduced by August Wilhelm Schlegel and adopted by Manzoni and other Italian romanticists, to the effect that form of component parts must be “organic not mechanical, resulting from the nature of the subject and its interior development... not from the impress of an external and extraneous stamp”?39

Their persistence in philosophical theories.

But it would be quite wrong to suppose that this victory over the rhetoric of kinds was either the cause or the consequence of a final victory over its philosophical presuppositions. In pure theory, none of the critics above named wholly abandoned the kinds and the rules. Berchet admitted four elementary forms, that is four fundamental kinds, in poetry; lyrical, didactic, epic and dramatic, claiming for the poet only the right of “uniting and fusing together the elementary forms in a thousand fashions.”40 Manzoni’s only real quarrel was with those rules “founded on special facts instead of on general principles; on the authority of rhetoricians instead of reason.”41 Even De Sanctis was satisfied with a concept somewhat vague, though true enough at bottom: “the most important rules are not those capable of being applied to every content, but those which draw their force ex visceribus caussæ, from the very heart of the content itself.”42 Even more diverting than the spectacle which had delighted Home, is the sight of German philosophy according the honour of a dialectical deduction to the empirical classification of kinds. We shall give two examples, each representing one extreme end of the chain:

Fr. Schelling.

Schelling at the beginning of the century (1803), and Hartmann at the end (1890). One section of Schelling’s Philosophy of Art is devoted to “the construction of individual poetic kinds”; in it he remarks that were he to follow the historical order, Epic would come first; whereas in the scientific order the Lyric occupies the first place: indeed, if poetry is the representation of the infinite in the finite, the Lyric, in which difference prevails (the finite, the subject), is its first moment, corresponding with the first power of the ideal series, reflexion, knowledge, consciousness, whereas Epic corresponds with the second power, action.43 From Epic, which is par excellence the objective kind (as being the identity of subjective and objective), derive the Elegy and the Idyl if subjectivity be placed in the object and objectivity in the poet: if objectivity be placed in the object and subjectivity in the poet, didactic poetry results.44 To these differentiations of the Epic, Schelling adds the romantic or modern Epic, the poem of chivalry; the novel; and the experiments in an epic of ordinary life such as the Luisa of Voss and the Hermann and Dorothea of Goethe; and, co-ordinate with all the foregoing, the Comedia of Dante, “an epic kind in itself” (eine epische Gattung für sich). Finally, from the union on a higher plane of Lyric with Epic, liberty with necessity, arises the third form, the Drama, the reconciliation of antitheses in a totality, “supreme incarnation of the essence and the in-itself of all art.”45

E. von Hartmann.

In Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Beautiful, poetry is divided into spoken poetry and read poetry. The former is subdivided into Epic, Lyric and Dramatic, with further subdivisions of Epic into plastic Epic, or strictly epic Epic, and pictorial or lyrical Epic; of Lyric into epical Lyric, lyrical Lyric and dramatic Lyric; of Dramatic into lyrical Drama, epic Drama and dramatic Drama. Read poetry (Lese poesie) is again subdivided into predominantly epical, lyrical or dramatic form with tertiary partitions of the affecting, the comic, the tragic and humorous; and into poems “to be read at a sitting” (like the short story) or to be taken up again and again (like the novel).46

The kinds in the schools.

Without these highly philosophical trivialities the divisions of kinds still wander through the books called Institutions of Literature, written by philologists and men of letters, and the ordinary school-books of Italy, France and Germany; and psychologists and philosophers still persist in writing about the Æsthetic of the tragic, of the comic and of the humorous.47 The objectivity of literary kinds is frankly maintained by Ferdinand Brunetière, who looks on literary history as “the evolution of kinds,”48 and gives sharply defined form to a superstition which, seldom confessed so truthfully or applied so rigorously, survives to contaminate modern literary history.49

Notes

1 Republic, iii. 394; see also E. Müller, Gesch. i. Th. d. Kunst, i. pp. 134-206; ii. pp. 238-239, note.

2 Poet. ch. 6

3 Annotazioni, introd.

4 Cf. for Sanskrit poetry S. Levi, Le Théâtre indien, pp. 11-152.

5 Cf. Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. I., i. pp. 126-154, 2nd ed.

6 Introd. to his tr. of the Poetics.

7 Lintilhac, Un Coup d’état, etc., p. 543.

8 Hamburg. Dramat. Nos. 81, 101-104.

9 Op. cit. Nos. 96, 101-104.

10 G. B. Giraldi Cintio, De’ romanzi, delle comedie e delle tragedie, 1554 (ed. Dælli, 1864).

11 Iacopo Mazzoni, Difesa della commedia di Dante, Cesena, 1587.

12 G. M. Cecchi, prologue to Romanesca, 1585.

13 Cf. besides the two Veratti, the Compendio della poesia tragicomica, Venice, 1601.

14 Proginn. poet., Florence, 1627, iii. p. 130.

15 Cf. A. Belloni, Il seicento, Milan, 1898, pp. 162-164.

16 Examens, and Discours du poème dramatique, de la tragédie, des trois unités, etc.

17 Réflexions sur le comique larmoyant, 1749 (trans. by Lessing, Werke, vol. cit.).

18 Gellert, De comædia commovente, 1751; Lessing, Abhandlungen von den weinerlichen oder rührenden Lustspiele, 1754 (in Werke, vol. vii.).

19 Prologue to the Cortigiana, 1534.

20 Degli eroici furori in Opere italiane, ed. Gentile, ii. pp. 310-311.

21 Il Veratto (against Jason de Nores), Ferrara, 1588.

22 Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. pp. 174-175 (1st ed.), i.

23 Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. p. 468 (2nd ed.).

24 Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609), ed. Morel Fatio, 11. 40-41, 138-140, 157-158.

25 Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. p. 459.

26 Marino, letter to G. Preti, in Lettere, Venice, 1627, p. 127.

27 Dell’ arte rappresentiva meditata e all’ improvviso, Naples, 1699; cf. pp. 47, 48, 65.

28 Trattato dello stile e del dialogo, 1646, preface.

29 Discorso su l’ Endimione (in Opere italiane, ed. cit.), ii. pp. 15-16.

30 Della tragedia, 1715 (ibid. vol. i.).

31 Prose e poesie, cit., pref. and passim.

32 In Orsi, Considerazioni, ed. cit. ii. pp. 8, 9.

33 Réflexions, cit. sect. 34.

34 Discours sur la tragédie, 1730.

35 Opuscoli of Agatopisto Cromaziano, Venice, 1797.

36 Danzel, Gottsched, p. 206 seqq.

37 Elements of Criticism, iii. pp. 144-145, note.

38 See conversation of Napoleon with Goethe, in Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe, ii. p. 441.

39 Manzoni, Epistol. i. pp. 355-356; cf. Lettera sul romanticismo, ibid. pp. 293-299.

40 Lettera di Grisostomo, opere, ed. Cusani, p. 227.

41 Lettera sul romanticismo, ibid. p. 280.

42 La giovinezza di F. de S. chs. 26-28.

43 Philos, d. Kunst, pp. 639-645.

44 Op. cit. pp. 657-659.

45 Op. cit. p. 687.

46 Philosophie d. Schönen, ch. 2, § 2.

47 See, e.g., Volkelt, Ästh. d. Tragischen, Munich, 1897; Lipps, Der Streit über Tragödie, etc.

48 See his other works, L’évolution des genres dans l’histoire de la littérature, Paris, 1890 seqq., and Manuel de l’hist. de la littér. française, ibid., 1898.

49 Croce, Per la storia della critica e storiografia letter, pp. 23-25.