[55] Ästh. §§ 83-84, 154-155.
[56] Ästh. Forsch. p. 413.
[XIV]
ÆSTHETIC IN FRANCE, ENGLAND AND ITALY DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Æsthetic movement in France: Cousin, Jouffroy.
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century German thought, notwithstanding the glaring errors which vitiated it, and were soon to bring about a violent and indeed exaggerated reaction, must on the whole be awarded the foremost place in the general history of European thought as well as in the individual study of Æsthetic, the contemporary philosophy of other countries standing on an inferior level of the second and third degree. France still lay under the dominion of the sensationalism of Condillac and, at the opening of the century, was quite incapable of grasping the spiritual activity of art. A faint gleam of Winckelmann's abstract spiritualism just appears in the theories of Quatremère de Quincy, who, in criticism of Émeric-David (in his turn a critic of ideal beauty and an adherent of the imitation of nature),[1] maintained that the arts of design have pure beauty, devoid of individual character, as their objective; they depict man and not; men.[2] Some sensationalists, such as Bonstetten, vainly endeavoured to trace the peculiar processes of imagination in life and in art.[3] Followers of the orthodox spiritualism of the French universities date the beginning of a new era, and the foundation of Æsthetic in France, to 1818, the year when Victor Cousin first delivered at the Sorbonne his lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good, which later formed his book with the same name, frequently reprinted.[4] These lectures of Cousin are but poor stuff, although some scraps of Kant are to be found in them here and there; he denies the identity of the beautiful with the pleasant or useful, and substitutes the affirmation of a threefold beauty, physical, intellectual and moral, the last being the true ideal beauty, having its foundations in God; he says that art expresses ideal Beauty, the infinite, God, that genius is the power of creation, and that taste is a mixture of fancy, sentiment and reason.[5] Academic phrases all of them; pompous and void and, for that very reason, well received. Of much greater value were the lectures on Æsthetic delivered by Théodore Jouffroy in 1822, before a small audience, and published posthumously in 1843.[6] Jouffroy allowed a beauty of expression, to be found alike in art and nature: a beauty of imitation, consisting in the perfect accuracy with which a model is reproduced: a beauty of idealisation, which reproduces the model, accentuating a particular quality in order to give it greater significance: and, finally, a beauty of the invisible or of content, reducible to force (physical, sensible, intellectual, moral), which, as force, awakens sympathy. Ugliness is the negation of this sympathetic beauty; its species or modifications are the sublime and the graceful. One sees that Jouffroy did not succeed in isolating the strictly æsthetic fact in his analysis and gave, instead of a scientific system, little beyond explanations of the use of words. He could not see or understand that expression, imitation and idealization are identical with each other and with artistic activity. Moreover he had many curious ideas, chiefly concerning expression. He said that if we were to see a drunkard with all the most disgusting symptoms of intoxication on a road where there was also an unhewn rock, we should be pleased by the drunken man, since he had expression, and not by the rock, since it had none. Beside Jouffroy, whose theories, crude and immature though they be, reveal an inquiring mind, it is hardly worth while to cite Lamennais,[7] who like Cousin regarded art as the manifestation of the infinite through the finite, of the absolute through the relative. French Romanticism in de Bonald, de Barante and Mme. de Staël had defined literature as "the expression of society," had honoured, under German influence, the characteristic and the grotesque,[8] and had proclaimed the independence of art by means of the formula "art for art's sake"; but these vague affirmations or aphorisms did not supersede, philosophically speaking, the old doctrine of the "imitation of nature."
English Æsthetic.
In England associationistic psychology still flourished (and has continued to flourish uninterruptedly), unable to emancipate itself wholly from sensationalism or to understand imagination. Dugald Stewart[9] had recourse to the wretched expedient of establishing two forms of association: one of accidental associations, the other of associations innate in human nature and therefore common to all mankind. England did not escape German influence, as appears, for example, in Coleridge, to whom we owe a saner concept of poetry and the difference between it and science[10] (in collaboration with the poet Wordsworth), and in Carlyle, who placed intellect lower than imagination, "organ of the Divine." The most noteworthy English æsthetic essay of this period is the Defence of Poetry by Shelley (1821),[11] containing profound, if not very systematic, views on the distinctions between reason and imagination, prose and poetry; on primitive language and the faculty of poetic objectification which enshrines and preserves "the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."