The first form may be called the Overcoming of the Ugly. This theory conceives the comic, the sublime, the tragic, the humorous, and so forth, as so many engagements in the war between the Ugly and the Beautiful, wherein the latter was invariably victorious, and arose by means of this war to more and more lofty and complex manifestations. The second form of the theory may be described as the Passage from Abstract to Concrete; it held that Beauty cannot emerge from the abstract, cannot become this or that concrete beauty, except by particularizing itself in the comic, tragic, sublime, humorous, or some other modification. The first form was already well developed in Solgei, an adherent of the romantic theory of Irony: but historically it presupposes the æsthetic theory of the Ugly, first sketched by Friedrich Schlegel in 1797. We have already noted that Schlegel considered the characteristic or interesting, not the beautiful, to be the principle of modern art; hence the importance attached by him to the piquant, the striking (frappant), the daring, the cruel, the ugly.[50] Solger found here the basis for his dialectic; amongst other things he maintains that the finite, earthly element may be dissolved and absorbed in the divine, which constitutes the tragic: or else the divine element may be entirely corrupted by the earthly, producing the comic.[51] These methods of Solger were followed by Weisse (1830), and by Ruge (1837); for the former, ugliness is "the immediate existence of beauty" which is overcome in the sublime and the comic; for the latter, the effort to achieve the Idea, or the Idea searching for itself, generates the sublime; when the Idea loses instead of discovering itself, ugliness is produced; when the Idea rediscovers itself and rises out of ugliness to new life, the comic.[52] A whole treatise entitled The Æsthetic of the Ugly[53] was published by Rosenkranz in 1853, presenting this concept as intermediate between the beautiful and the comic, and tracing it from its first origin to that "sort of perfection" it attains in the satanic. Passing from the common (Gemeine) which is the petty, the weak, the low, and the sub-species of the low, viz. the usual, the casual, the arbitrary and the crude, Rosenkranz goes on to describe the repugnant, trisected into the awkward, the dead and empty, and the horrible: thus he proceeds from tripartition to tripartition, dividing the horrible into the absurd, the nauseating and the wicked: the wicked into criminal, spectral and diabolical: the diabolical into demoniac, magical and satanic. He opposes the childish notion that ugliness acts as a foil to beauty in art, and justifies its introduction by the necessity for art to represent the entire appearance of the Idea; on the other hand he admits that the ugly is not on the same level as the beautiful, for, if the beautiful can stand by itself alone, the other cannot do so and must always be reflected by and in the beautiful.[54]
Passage from abstract to concrete: Vischer.
The second form prevailed with Vischer. The following extract will serve as an illustration of his manner: "The Idea arouses itself from the tranquil unity in which it was fused with the appearance and pushes onward, affirming, in face of its own finitude, its infinity"; this rebellion and transcendence is the sublime. "But Beauty demands full satisfaction for this disruption of its harmony: the violated right of the image must be reasserted: this can be accomplished only by means of a fresh contradiction, that is to say by the negative position now taken up by the image towards the Idea by rejecting all interpenetration with it and by affirming its own separate existence as the whole"; this second moment is the comic, negation of a negation.[55] The same process is further enriched and complicated by Zeising, who compares the modifications of Beauty to the refraction of colours: the three primary modifications, the sublime, the attractive and the humorous, correspond with the primary colours violet, orange and green; the three secondary, pure beauty, comic and tragic, to the colours red, yellow and blue. Each of these six modifications (exactly like the degrees of the Ugly in Rosenkranz) branches out, like fireworks, into three rays: pure beauty into the decorous, noble and pleasing: the attractive into graceful, interesting and piquant: the comic into buffoonery, the diverting and burlesque: the humorous into the quaint, capricious and melancholy: the tragic into the moving, pathetic and demoniac: the sublime into the glorious, majestic and imposing.[56]
The Legend of Sir Purebeauty.
All the works of this period on Æsthetic are filled in this way with the gest, chanson or romaunt of the knight Sir Purebeauty (Reinschon) and his extraordinary adventures, recounted in two conflicting versions. According to one story, Sir Purebeauty is constrained to abandon his beloved leisure by the Mephistophelean devices of the temptress Ugliness, who leads him into countless dangers from which he invariably emerges victorious; his victories and successes (his Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena) are called the Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous and so forth. The other story tells how the knight, bored by his life of loneliness, sallies forth purposely to seek adversaries and occasions for fighting; he is always vanquished, but even in his overthrow ferum victorem capit, he transforms and irradiates the enemy. Beyond this artificial mythology, this legend composed without the least imagination or literary skill, this miserably dull tale, it is vain to look for anything whatever in the much elaborated theory of German æstheticians known as the Modifications of Beauty.
[1] Abriss der Ästhetik, post. 1837; Vorlesung üb. Ästh. (1828-1829), post. 1882.
[2] Ästhetik, Berlin, 1827.
[3] Ästhetik, Leipzig, 1830; System d. Ästh., lectures, post. Leipzig, 1872.
[4] Kunstlehre, Ratisbon, 1845-1846 (Grundlinien einer positiven Philosophie, vols. iv. v.).