[VII]
OTHER ÆSTHETIC DOCTRINES OF THE SAME PERIOD
Other writers of the eighteenth century: Batteux.
A great medley of heterogeneous ideas is noticeable among other writers on Æsthetic during the same period. In 1746 appeared a little volume by Abbé Batteux bearing the attractive title of The Fine Arts reduced to a Single Principle, in which the author attempted a unification of all the different rules laid down by the writers of treatises. All such rules (says Batteux) are branches emerging from one trunk; he who possesses the simple principle will be able to deduce the rules one by one without entangling himself in their mass, which can but involve him in endless coils. The author had passed in review the Ars Poetica of Horace and that of Boileau, and the works of Rollin, Dacier, le Bossu and d'Aubignac; but had found real help only in Aristotle's principle of imitation, which he thought could be easily and strikingly applied to poetry, painting, music and the art of gesture. But suddenly the Aristotelian principle of imitation yields place to a wholly new rendering, namely the "imitation of natural beauty." The business of art is to "select the most beautiful parts of nature in order to frame them into an exquisite whole which shall be more beautiful than nature's self, without ceasing to be natural." Now, what may this greater perfection, this beautiful nature, be? On one occasion Batteux identifies it with truth: but "with the truth which may be; with beauty-truth, which is represented as though it really existed with all the perfections it could possibly receive," recalling one example from the ancients in the Helen of Zeuxis, and one from the moderns in the Misanthrope of Molière. In another place he explains that beautiful nature, "tum ipsius (obiecti) naturæ, tum nostræ convenit," i.e. that it has the closest connexion with our own perfection, our advantage and our interest, and is, at the same time, perfect in itself. The aim of imitation is "to please, to move, to soften, in one word, to delight"; so beautiful nature must be interesting and furnished with unity, variety, symmetry and proportion. Embarrassed by the question of artistic imitation of things naturally ugly or objectionable, Batteux falls back on saying, as Castelvetro had said before him, that displeasing objects please when imitated, since imitation, being always imperfect, in comparison with the reality, cannot excite the horror and disgust aroused by the latter. From pleasure he deduces the other aim of utility: if the aim of poetry be to give pleasure, and "pleasure by moving the passions, then in order to give a perfect and enduring pleasure it ought to rouse such passions only as it is well to excite, not those inimical to goodness."[1]
The English: W. Hogarth.
It is difficult to string together a more insubstantial mass of contradictions. But Batteux is rivalled and outdone by the English philosophers or rather scribblers on Æsthetic or rather on things in general which sometimes accidentally include æsthetic facts. Happening to find in Lomazzo some words attributed to Michæl Angelo on the beauty of shapes, Hogarth the artist took into his head the idea that the figurative arts can be regulated by a special principle which can be expressed in a particular fine.[2] Filled with this discovery, in 1745 he designed a frontispiece for a volume of his engravings; it depicted a painter's palette scored across with an undulating line and the words The Line of Beauty. Public curiosity was immediately aroused by this hieroglyphic, to be satisfied a little later by the publication of his book The Analysis of Beauty (1753).[3] In this he combated the mistake of judging pictures either by the subject or the excellence of the imitation instead of by their form, which is the true essential of art and is composed "of symmetry, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy and quantity; all things which co-operate in the production of beauty, correcting and restraining each other as required."[4] But immediately afterwards Hogarth proclaims that there must also be correspondence and agreement with the thing copied; for "regularity, uniformity and symmetry give pleasure in so far only as they serve to give the illusion of faithful correspondence."[5] Further on, the reader learns that "amongst the immense variety of undulating lines which may be conceived, there is but one which truly merits the name of the Line of Beauty, and this is a precisely serpentine line which may be called the Line of Grace."[6] Again, we are told that intricacy of lines is beautiful because "the active mind likes to be engaged," and the eye delights in being "guided in a sort of hunt."[7] A straight line has no beauty, and the pig, the bear, the spider and the toad are ugly because devoid of undulating lines.[8] The ancients showed much judgement in the management and grouping of lines, "varying from the precise line of grace only on those occasions when the character or action demanded."[9]
E. Burke.
With similar indecision Edmund Burke wavers between the principle of imitation and other heterogeneous or imaginary principles in his book, An Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756). He observes, "Natural properties contained in an object give pleasure or displeasure to the imagination: beyond this, however, imagination may delight in the likeness of a copy to its original"; he asserts that from "these two reasons" arises the whole pleasure of imagination.[10]