That there was no real "talk" about Art, at the time when it was revived in the Middle Ages, and at the time when it flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that all the old Hellenic discussions on the subject should have been taken up again at a period when the last emaciated blooms of the Renaissance and of the counter-Renaissance were bowing their heads, only shows how very sorry the plight of all great human functions must be when man begins to hope that he may set them right by talking about them.
When it is remembered, however, that, from the end of the seventeenth century onward, Art was regarded either as imitation pure and simple or as idealized imitation by no less than fifteen thinkers of note—that is to say, roughly speaking, by the Earl of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke and Hume in England, by Batteux and Diderot in France, by Pagano and Spaletti in Italy, by Hemsterhuis in Holland, and by Leibnitz, Baumgarten, Kant, Schiller and Fichte in Germany; and that if Winckelmann and Lessing opposed these ideas, it was rather with the recommendation of another kind of imitation—that of the antique— than with a new valuation of Art; we can feel scarcely any surprise at all at the sudden and total collapse of the dignity of Art in the nineteenth century, under the deadly influence of the works of men like Semper and his followers.
It is all very well to point to men like Goethe, Heydenreich, Schelling, Hegel, Hogarth and Reynolds—all of whom certainly did a good deal to brace the self-respect of artists; but it is impossible to argue that any one of them took up either such a definite or such a determined attitude against the fifteen others whom I have mentioned, as could materially stem the tide of democratic Art which was rising in Europe. And if in the latter half of the nineteenth century we have Ruskin telling us that "the art which makes us believe what we would not otherwise have believed, is misapplied, and in most instances very dangerously so";[7] and if we find that his first principle is, "that our graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to produce something which shall look as like Nature as possible,"[8] and that, in extolling the Gothic, he says it was "the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistic laws";[9] we realize how very slight the effect of those exceptional spirits, headed by Goethe, must have been.
[1] See his evidence before the Joint Committee on the Stage Censorship.—Daily Press, September 24th, 1909.
[2] T. I., Part 10, Aph. 19: "Man believes the world itself to be overcharged with beauty,—he forgets that he is the cause of it. He alone has endowed it with beauty.... In reality man mirrors himself in things; he counts everything beautiful which reflects his likeness.... Is the world really beautiful, just because man thinks it is? Man has humanized it, that is all."
[3] Æsthetic (Douglas Ainslie's translation), p. 259. See also B. Bosanquet, A History of Æsthetic, pp. 15-18.
[4] Sämmtliche Werke, Vol. V, "Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums," pp. 346, 347.
[5] Dr. Max Schasler (Kritische Geschichte der Æsthetik, p. 73) agrees that the understanding of Art in classical antiquity seems to be quite barbaric in its stupidity ("von einer geradezu barbarischen Bornirtheit"); but he adds that this may be an argument in favour of the antique; for it may prove the unconsciousness of the artists and the absolute unity of the artistic life and of artistic appreciation in antiquity.
[6] Aristotle was, of course, studied and commentated to a very great extent during these fifteen centuries; but in all the branches of science save Æsthetic. Where his Poetic was examined, the philological or literary-historical interest was paramount. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas do not differ materially from Plotinus and Plato.