Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

III The Theory of the Limits of the Arts

To Lessing must be ascribed the merit and the sole glory of having discovered that every art has its special character and inviolable limits. But his merit lies not in his own theory, which, in itself, is scarcely tenable,1 but in having, though by an error, aroused discussion of a highly important æsthetical point till then wholly overlooked. After some slight notice from Du Bos and Batteux, some preparation of the field by Diderot2 and Mendelssohn,3 and long disquisitions by Meier and other Wolffians upon natural and conventional symbols,4 Lessing was the first to raise clearly the question of the value attaching to the distinction between the various arts. Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had enumerated the arts according to denominations of current phraseology, and had composed numbers of technical hand-books distinguishing major and minor arts; but in Aristoxenus or Vitruvius, Marchetto da Padova or Cennino Cennini, Leonardo da Vinci or Leon Battista Alberti, Palladio or Scamozzi, it would be vain to look for the problem proposed by Lessing, for the spirit of these technical treatise-writers is entirely different. Some rudiments of the question may be detected in the comparisons made, and the questions of precedence raised, between poetry and painting or painting and sculpture, to be found now and then in stray paragraphs of their books (Leonardo da Vinci pressed the claims of painting, Michæl Angelo those of sculpture): the theme eventually became a favourite one for academic discussion, and was not despised by Galileo himself.5

The limits of the arts in Lessing. Arts of space and arts of time.

Lessing was induced to raise the question in the attempt to controvert the strange views of Spence concerning the close union between painting and poetry among the ancients, and of Count Caylus, who held that the excellence of a poem must be judged by the number of subjects it offers to the brush of the painter. He was further instigated by the comparisons between poetry and painting upon which were commonly founded the most ridiculous rules for tragedy: the maxim Ut pictura poësis, whose original motive was to emphasize the representative or imaginative character of poetry, and the community of nature among the arts, had been converted by superficial interpretation into a defence of the most vicious intellectualistic and realistic prejudices. Lessing argued in this wise: “If painting in its imitations employs precisely a medium or symbol different from that of poetry (the former employing spatial forms and colours, the latter temporal articulated sounds), since the symbol must certainly be in close relation with that which is signified, coexistent symbols can only express coexistent objects or parts of objects, and consecutive symbols can only express consecutive objects or parts of objects. Objects mutually coexistent, or having mutually coexistent parts, are called bodies. Bodies, then, through their quality of visibility, are the true objects of painting. Objects successively consecutive amongst themselves, or whose parts are consecutive, are called in general actions. Actions, then, are the suitable objects of poetry.” Painting, undoubtedly, may represent action, but only by means of bodies which indicate it; and poetry may represent bodies, but only by indicating them by means of actions. When a poet using language, i.e. arbitrary symbols, sets himself to describe bodies, he is no longer a poet but a prose-writer, since a true poet only describes bodies by the effect they produce on the soul.6 Retouching and developing this distinction, Lessing described action or movement in a picture as an addition made by the imagination of the beholder; so true is this, says he, that animals perceive nothing save immobility in a picture. He further studied the various unions of arbitrary with natural symbols, such as that of poetry with music (in which the former is subordinate to the latter), of music with dancing, of poetry with dancing, and of music and poetry with dancing (union of arbitrary consecutive audible symbols with natural visible symbols): of the pantomime of antiquity (union of arbitrary consecutive visible symbols with natural consecutive visible symbols): of the language of the dumb (the only art that employs arbitrary consecutive visible symbols): and, lastly, of imperfect unions, such as that of painting with poetry. If not every use to which language is put is poetic, Lessing holds that not every use of natural coexistent signs is pictorial: painting, like language, has its prose. Prosaic painters are those who represent consecutive objects notwithstanding the character of coexistence in their signs, allegorical painters those who make arbitrary use of natural signs, and those who pretend to represent the invisible or the audible by means of the visible. Desirous of preserving the naturalness of symbolism, Lessing ended by condemning the custom of painting objects on a diminished scale, and concludes: “I think that the aim of an art should be that only to which it is specially adapted, not that which can be performed equally well by other arts. I find in Plutarch a comparison which illustrates this admirably: he who would split wood with a key and open the door with an axe not only spoils both utensils but deprives himself of the unity of each alike.”[7]

Limits and classifications of the arts in later philosophy.

The principle of limitations or of the specific character of individual arts, as laid down by Lessing, occupied the attention of philosophers in later days, who, without discussing the principle itself, employed it in classifying the arts and arranging them in series.

Herder and Kant.

Herder here and there continued Lessing’s examination in his fragment on Plastic (1769);8 Heydenreich wrote a treatise (1790) on the limits of the six arts (music, dance, figurative arts gardening, poetry and representative art), and criticized the clavecin oculaire of Father Castel, a contrivance for the combination of colours which should act in the same way as the series of musical notes in harmony and melody,9 Kant appealed to the analogy of a speaking man, and classified the arts according to speech, gesture and tone as arts of speech, figurative arts, and arts producing a mere play of sensations (mimicry and colouring).10

Schelling.

Schelling differentiated the artistic identity according as it consisted in the infusion of the infinite into the finite, or of the finite into the infinite (ideal art or real art): into poetry and art proper. Under the heading of real arts he included the figurative arts, music, painting, plastic (which comprehended architecture, bas-relief and sculpture): in the ideal series were the three corresponding forms of poetry, lyrical, epical and dramatic.11

Solger.

With a similar method, Solger placed poetry, the universal art, side by side with art strictly so called, which is either symbolical (sculpture) or allegorical (painting), and, in either case, is a union of concepts and bodies: if you take corporality without concept, you have architecture; if concept without matter, music.12 Hegel makes poetry the bond of union between the two extremes of figurative art and of music.13

Schopenhauer.

We have already seen how Schopenhauer destroyed the accepted limitations of art and built them up again, following the order of the ideas which they represent.14 Herbart clung to Lessing’s two groups, simultaneous arts and successive arts, and defined the former as “permitting themselves to be inspected from every side,” the latter as “rejecting complete investigation and remaining in semi-darkness”: in the first group he placed architecture, plastic, church music and classical poetry; in the second ornamental gardening, painting, secular music and romantic poetry.15

Herbart.

Herbart was implacable against those who look in one art for the perfections of another; who “look on music as a sort of painting, painting as poetry, poetry as an elevated plastic and plastic as a species of æsthetic philosophy,”16 while admitting that a concrete work of art, such as a picture, may contain elements of the picturesque, the poetic and other kinds, held together by the skill of the artist.17

Weisse. Zeising.

Weisse divided the arts into three triads, intended to recall the nine Muses.18 Zeising invented-a cross-division into figurative arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), musical arts (instrumental music, song, poetry), and arts of mimicry (dance, musical mimicry, representative art), and into macrocosmic arts (architecture, instrumental music, dance), microcosmic arts (sculpture, song, musical mimicry) and historical arts (painting, poetry and representative art).19

Vischer.

Vischer classified them according to the three forms of imagination (figurative, sensuous and poetic), into objective arts (architecture, plastic and painting), a subjective art (music) and an objective-subjective art[20] (poetry). Gerber proposed to recognize a special “art of language” (Sprachkunst), distinguishable alike from prose and poetry and consisting in the expression of simple movements of the soul. Such an art would correspond with plastic in the following scheme: arts of the eye—(a) architecture, (b) plastic, (c) painting; arts of the ear—(a) prose, (b) the art of language, (c) poetry.21

M. Schasler.

The two most recent systems of classification are furnished by Schasler and Hartmann, who have also submitted the schemes of their predecessors to searching criticism. Schasler22 arranges the arts in two groups, adopting the criterion of simultaneity and succession: the arts of simultaneity are architecture, plastic and painting; of succession, music, mimicry and poetry. He says that by following the series in the order indicated, it will be seen that simultaneity, originally predominant, yields place to succession, which predominates in the second group and subordinates without wholly displacing the other. Parallel with this, another division is evolved, deduced from the relation between the ideal and material elements in each separate art, between movement and repose; which begins with architecture “materially the heaviest, spiritually the lightest of all the arts,” and ends with poetry, in which the opposite relation is observed. Curious analogies are established by this method between the first and second group of arts: between architecture and music; between plastic and mimicry; between painting in its three forms of landscape, genre and historical, and poetry in its three forms of lyric (declamatory), epic (rhapsodic) and drama (representative).

E. v. Hartmann.

Hartmann23 divides the arts into arts of perception and arts of imagination: the former tripartite into spatial or visual (plastic and painting), temporal or auditory (instrumental music, linguistic mimicry, expressive song) and temporal-spatial or mimic (pantomime, mimic dances, art of the actor, art of the opera-singer); the second contains but one single species, which is poetry. Architecture, decoration, gardening, cosmetic and prosewriting are excluded from this system of classification and lumped together as non-free arts.

The supreme art. Richard Wagner.

Parallel with this search for a classification of the arts, the same philosophers were led into the quest of the supreme art. Some favoured poetry, others music or sculpture; others again claimed the supremacy for combined arts, especially for Opera, according to the theory of it already advanced in the eighteenth century24 and maintained and developed in our day by Richard Wagner.25 One of the latest philosophers to raise the question “whether single arts, or arts in combination, had the greater value,” concluded that single arts as such possess their own perfection, yet the perfection of united arts is still greater, notwithstanding the compromises and mutual concessions enforced upon them by their union; that single arts, from another point of view, have the greater value; and lastly, that both single and combined arts are necessary to the realisation of the concept of art.[26]

Lotze’s attack on classifications.

The capriciousness, emptiness and childishness of such problems and their solutions must have excited feelings of impatience and disgust, but we rarely find a doubt thrown on their validity. One such dissentient is Lotze when he writes: “It is difficult to see the use of such attempts. Knowledge of the nature and laws of individual arts is but little increased by indication of the systematic place allotted to each.” He further observed that in real life the arts are variously conjoined, forming themselves into no systematic series, while in the world of thought an immense variety of orders can be created; he therefore selected one of these possible orders, not because it was the sole legitimate one, but because it was convenient (bequem). His series begins with music, “the art of free beauty, determined only by the laws of its matter, not by conditions imposed by a given task of purpose or of imitation”; followed by architecture, “which no longer plays freely with forms, but subjects them to the service of an end”; and then by sculpture, painting and poetry, excluding minor arts which cannot be co-ordinated with the others, since they are incapable of expressing with any approach to completeness the totality of the spiritual life.27 A recent French critic, Basch, opens his treatise with the following excellent remarks: “Is it necessary to show there is no such thing as an absolute art, differentiating itself later by means of one knows not what immanent laws? What exists is the particular forms of art, or rather artists who have striven to translate, as best they can, according to the material means at their command, the song of the ideal in their souls.” But later on he thinks it possible to effect a division of the arts by starting “from the artist, instead of the art in itself,” by proceeding “according to the three great types of fancy, visual, motor and auditory”; and as for the debated point of the supreme art, he thinks it must be settled in favour of music.28

Schasler is not altogether wrong in his spirited counterattack on Lotze’s criticism; he protests against the principle of indifference and convenience, and remarks that “the classification of the arts must be regarded as the real touchstone, the real differential test of the scientific value of an æsthetic system; for on this point all theoretical questions are concentrated and crowd together to find a concrete solution.”29

Contradictions in Lotze.

The principle of convenience may be excellent as applied to the approximative grouping of botanical or zoological classifications, but it has no place in philosophy; and as Lotze, in common with Schasler and other æstheticians, conformed to Lessing’s principle of the constancy, limits and peculiar nature of each art, and therefore held that the concepts of the individual arts were speculative and not empirical concepts, he could not evade the duty of fixing the mutual relations of these concepts, arranging them in series, subordinating and co-ordinating them, and arriving at each of them either deductively or dialectically. He ought, in order to get definitely rid of these barren attempts at classification and at discovering the supreme art, to have criticized and dissolved Lessing’s principle itself: to keep the principle and deny the need for a classification, as Lotze did, was obviously inconsistent. But not a single æsthetician has ever re-examined or investigated the scientific foundation of the distinctions enunciated by Lessing in his fluent and elegant prose; no one has probed to the bottom the truth which was illumined by Aristotle in a single lightning-flash, when he refused to allow an extrinsic difference, that of metre, as the real distinction between prose and poetry:30 no one, that is to say, save perhaps Schleiermacher, who at least called attention to the difficulties of the current doctrine.

Doubts in Schleiermacher.

He proposed to start from the general concept of art and prove by deduction the necessity of all its forms; and after finding two sides to artistic activity, the objective consciousness (gegenständliche) and the immediate consciousness (unmittelbare), and observing that art stands wholly neither in the one nor in the other and that the immediate consciousness or representation (Vorstellung) gives rise to mimicry and music, while the objective consciousness or image (Bild) gives rise to the figurative arts, he then, proceeding to analyse a painting, found the two forms of consciousness to be in this case inseparable, and remarks: “Here we arrive at the precise opposite: searching for distinction, we find unity.” Nor did the traditional division of the arts into simultaneous and successive seem to him very solid, for “when looked at attentively, it evaporates entirely”; in architecture or gardening, contemplation is successive, while in the arts labelled as successive, such as poetry, the chief thing is coexistence and grouping: “from whichever side we look at it, the difference is but secondary and the antithesis between the two orders of art merely means that every contemplation, like every act of production, is always successive, but, in thinking out the relation of the two sides in a work of art, both seem indispensable: coexistence (Zugleichsein) and successive existence (das Successivsein).” In another passage he observes: “The reality of art as external appearance is conditioned by the mode, depending on our physical and corporeal organism, in which the internal is externalised: movements, forms, words.... That which is common to all arts is not the external, which is rather the element of diversification.” When these observations are compared with the sharp distinction he himself drew between art and technique, it would be easy to deduce that he held the partitions of the arts and the concepts of the particular arts to be devoid of æsthetic value. But Schleiermacher does not draw this logical inference, he wavers and hesitates: he recognizes the inseparability of the subjective and objective, musical and figurative, elements in poetry, yet he struggles to discover the definitions and limits of the individual arts; sometimes he dreams of a union of the various arts from which a complete art would spring; and when composing the syllabus of his lectures on Æsthetic, he arranged the arts into arts of accompaniment (mimicry and music), figurative arts (architecture, gardening, painting, sculpture) and poetry.31 Nebulous, vague, contradictory as this may be, Schleiermacher had the acumen to distrust the soundness of Lessing’s theory and to inquire by what right particular arts are singled out from art in general.

Notes

1 See above, pp. 113-115.

2 D. Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, 1749; Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 1751; Essai sur la peinture, 1765.

3 M. Mendelssohn, Briefe über Empfind., 1755; Betrachtungen, cit., 1757.

4 J. Chr. Wolff, Psychol. empirica, §§ 272-312; Meier, Anfangsgründe, §§ 513-528, 708-735; Betrachtungen, § 126.

5 Letter to Lodovico Cardi da Cigoli, June 26, 1612.

6 Laokoon, §§ 16-20.

8 Laokoon, appendix, § 43.

9 Plastik einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildenden Träume, 1778 (Select Works of Herder in the collection Deutsche Nationlitteratur, vol. 76, part iii. § 2).

10 System der Ästhetik, pp. 154-236.

11 Kritik d. Urtheilskr. § 51. 5 Phil. d. Kunst, pp. 370-371.

12 Vorles. üb. Ästh. pp. 257-262.

13 Op. cit. ii. p. 222.

14 See above, pp. 305-306.

15 Einleitung, § 115, pp. 170-171.

16 Schriften z. prakt. Phil, in Werke, viii. p. 2.

17 Einleitung, § 110, pp. 164-165.

18 Cf. Hartmann, Dtsche. Ästh. s. Kant, pp. 539-540.

19 Ästh. Forsch. pp. 547-549.

20 Ästh. §§ 404, 535, 537, 838, etc.

21 Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, Bromberg, 1871-1874.

22 Das System der Künste, 2nd ed., Leipzig-Berlin, 1881.

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

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

25 Rich. Wagner, Oper und Drama, 1851.

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

27 Lotze, Geschichte d. Ästh. pp. 458-460; cf. p. 445.

28 Essai critique sur l’Esth. de Kant, pp. 89-496.

29 Das System der Künste, p. 47.

30 Poet. ch. i.

31 Vorles. üb. Ästh. pp. 11, 122-129, 137, 143, 151, 167, 172, 284-286, 487-488, 508, 635. ⁂