Without dwelling further on the second, he proceeds to a lengthy discussion of the natural qualities which should be found in an object of sensible beauty: "Firstly, comparative smallness; secondly, smooth surface; thirdly, variety in disposition of the parts; fourthly, that it have no angularity, all lines fusing one in another; fifthly, a structure of great delicacy betraying no signs of violence; sixthly, vivid colouring without glare or harshness; seventhly, if it have any glaring colour, let it be different from the background." These are the properties of beauty working in harmony with nature and least liable to suffer from caprice and differences of taste.[11]
H. Home.
These books of Hogarth and Burke are generally described as classical; if so, they belong to the type of classic that fails to convince. To a somewhat higher type belongs the Elements of Criticism (1761) of Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, who seeks "the true principles of the fine arts" with the object of converting criticism into "a rational science," and to this end chooses "the upward path of facts and experiments." Home confines himself to feelings derived from objects of sight and hearing, which, in so far as unaccompanied by desires, are more truly described as simple feelings (emotions, not passions). These occupy a middle position between mere sense-impressions and intellectual or moral ideas, and are therefore akin to both; and it is from these that the pleasures of beauty are derived. Beauty is divided into beauty of relation and intrinsic beauty.[12] Of the latter, Home's only account is that regularity, simplicity, uniformity, proportion, order and other pleasing qualities have been "so disposed by the Author of nature in order to increase our happiness here on earth which, as is clearly shown in numberless instances, is not foreign to his care." This notion is confirmed when he reflects that "our taste for such details is not accidental, but uniform and universal, being a very part of our nature"; adding that "regularity, uniformity, order and simplicity help to facilitate perception and make it possible for us to form clearer conception of objects than it would be possible to gain by the most earnest attention were such qualities not present." Proportions are often combined with a view to utility, "as we see that the best proportioned amongst animals are also the strongest; but there are also many examples in which this conjunction does not hold good"; wherefore the wisest plan "is to rest content with the final cause just mentioned: that of the increase of our happiness intended by the Author of nature."[13] In his Essay on Taste (1758) and on Genius (1774) Alexander Gérard employs by turns, according to the various forms of art, the principles of association, of direct pleasure, of expression, and even of moral sense: the same kind of explanation reappears in another Essay on Taste by Alison (1792).
Eclecticism and sensationalism. E. Platner.
It is impossible to classify works of such calibre, almost wholly lacking as they are in scientific method; on each page their writers pass from physiological sensationalism to moralism; from the imitation of nature to mysticism and transcendent finalism without the slightest sense of incongruity. It would be absurd to take them seriously; in comparison it is almost refreshing to come across a frank hedonist in the German, Ernst Plainer, who interpreted Hogarth's inquiry into lines after a fashion of his own and was unable to see anything in æsthetic facts except a reverberation of sexual pleasure. Where can we find a beauty, he asks, that is not derived from the female figure, the centre of all beauty? Undulating lines are beautiful because found in a woman's body; beautiful are all movements distinctively feminine; beautiful the tones of music melting one into another; beautiful the poem where one thought embraces another with tenderness and facility.[14] Condillac's sensationalism had already shown itself wholly incapable of understanding æsthetic productivity; the associationism especially promoted by the work of Hume fared no better.
Fr. Hemsterhuis.
The Dutchman Hemsterhuis considered beauty as a phenomenon born of the meeting between sensibility, which gives multiplicity, and the internal sense, which tends to unity; hence the beautiful is "that which exhibits the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time." Man, to whom it is not permitted to attain ultimate unity, finds in beauty an approximate unity which gives him a pleasure somewhat analogous with the joy of love. This theory of Hemsterhuis, in which elements of mysticism and sensationalism mingle with glimpses of truth, developed later into the sentimentalism of Jacobi, for whom the totality of Truth and Goodness and even the Supersensible itself are sensibly present to the soul in the form of beauty.[15]
Neo-Platonism and mysticism. Winckelmann.
Platonism or, more accurately, neo-Platonism was revived by the creator of the history of figurative art, Winckelmann (1764). Contemplation of the masterpieces of antique plastic art, and the impression of superhuman loftiness and divine indifference which they create all the more irresistibly because we cannot reawaken the life they once possessed or understand their real significance, led Winckelmann, and others with him, to the conception of a Beauty which, descending from the seventh heaven of the divine Idea, embodied itself in works of this description. Baumgarten's follower Mendelssohn had denied the enjoyment of beauty to God: the neo-Platonist Winckelmann gave it back to him and lodged it in his bosom.