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.