Hartmann and the theory of Modifications.
In his employment of the exciting or reactionary influence of the Ugly, Hartmann exceeded Schasler himself. Lowest among the degrees of Beauty, indeed forming the lower limit of æsthetic fact, lies sensuous pleasure, which is unconscious formal beauty; its first true degree is formal beauty of the first order, or the mathematically pleasing (unity, variety, symmetry, proportion, the golden section, etc.); its second degree is formal beauty of the second order, the dynamically pleasing; its third is formal beauty of the third order, the passive teleological, as in the case of utensils or machinery. Indeed it may here be noted that among machines and utensils, on a level with jars, plates and cups, Hartmann placed language: it is a dead thing, said he; receiving the appearances of life (Scheinleben)[19] only at the very instant of utterance. Language a "dead thing," an "utensil" for the philosopher of the Unconscious, in the land of Humboldt, with a Steinthal still living! There follow, as formal beauty of the fourth order, the active teleological or living, and as formal beauty of the fifth order, conformity to species (das Gattungsmässige): lastly and above all, since the individual idea is superior to the specific, is beauty concrete beauty or the microcosmic individual, which is no longer formal, but beauty of content. As is to be expected, the passage from lower to Higher degrees is made by means of the Ugly: nobody has laboured like Hartmann to recount in detail the services rendered by Ugliness to Beauty. From ugliness, in the form of the destruction of the beauty of equality, arises symmetry: from ugliness in the case of the circle arises the ellipse; the beauty of a waterfall tumbling over rocks is caused by the mathematically ugly; destruction, that is to say, of a fall in a parabolic curve; beauty of spiritual expression is achieved through the introduction of an ugliness relative to fleshly perfection. Beauty of a higher degree is founded on ugliness at a lower degree. When the highest degree is reached, that of individual beauty beyond which there can be nothing, even then elemental ugliness continues its work of beneficent irritation. The later phases thus produced are well known to us as the famous Modifications of the Beautiful: in this section also, nobody is so copious or detailed as Hartmann. He certainly does admit, side by side with simple or pure beauty, certain modifications free from conflict, such as the sublime or graceful; but the more important modifications can arise only through conflict. There are four cases, because the resolution must be either immanent, logical, transcendent or combined: immanent in the idyllic, the melancholy, the sad, the cheerful, the moving, the elegiac; logical in the comic in all its varieties; transcendent in the tragic; combined in the humorous with the tragi-comic and its other varieties. When none of these resolutions is possible, there arises ugliness; when an ugliness of content is expressed by an ugliness of form, we have the maximum of ugliness, the real æsthetic devil.
Metaphysical Æsthetic in France. C. Levêque.
Hartmann is the last considerable representative of the old æsthetic school in Germany; he inspires terror by the mass of his literary production, like many others of the school, who seem to accept it as a dogma that art cannot be dealt with except in several volumes a thousand pages long. Those who are not afraid of giants and are able to attack this sort of Æsthetic, will find it a fat good-humoured Magog full of vulgar prejudices, and so constituted that, despite his apparent strength, a little blow will kill him.
In other countries metaphysical Æsthetic had few followers. In France the celebrated competition of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1857 crowned with their approval and presented to the world the Science of Beauty by Levêque;[20] of which nobody now thinks or speaks, only remembering the author (who attitudinized as a disciple of Plato) by his eight characteristics of Beauty, derived by him from examination of a lily. The eight characteristics were as follows:—sufficient size of form, unity, variety, harmony, proportion, normal vivacity of colour, grace and propriety; ultimately reducible to two, size and order. As supplementary proof of the truth of his theory, Levêque applied it to three beautiful things: a child playing with its mother, a symphony of Beethoven and the life of a philosopher (Socrates). Really, it is somewhat difficult (says one of his fellow-spiritualists, venturing to comment on this doctrine though speaking with the utmost deference) to imagine what may be the normal vivacity of colour in the life of a philosopher.[21] Translations and explanatory articles by Charles Bénard[22] and books by various writers belonging to French Switzerland (Töpffer, Pictet, Cherbuliez) were not successful in popularizing the German systems of Æsthetic in France.
In England. J. Ruskin.
England showed even less disposition to interest herself, although John Ruskin may have some claim to be considered a metaphysical æsthetician with a distinctive national stamp. But it is difficult to treat of Ruskin in a history of science, for his temperament was wholly opposed to the scientific. His disposition was that of the artist, impressionable, excitable, voluble, rich in feeling; a dogmatic tone and the appearance of theoretical form veil, in his exquisite and enthusiastic pages, a texture of dreams and fancies. The reader who recalls those pages will regard as irreverent any detailed and prosaic review of Ruskin's æsthetic thought, which must inevitably reveal its poverty and incoherence. Suffice it to say that, following a finalistic, mystical intuition of nature, he considered beauty as a revelation of divine intentions, the seal "God sets on his works, even upon the smallest." For him the faculty which perceives the beautiful is neither intellect nor sensibility, but a particular feeling which he names the theoretic faculty. Natural beauty, which reveals itself to a pure heart when contemplating any object untouched and unspoiled by the hand of man, asserts itself for this reason as immeasurably superior to any work of art. Ruskin was too hasty in analysis to understand the complicated psychological and æsthetic process which went on in his mind when he was moved to an artist's ecstasy by contemplating some humble natural object such as a bird's nest or a flowing rivulet.[23]
Æsthetic in Italy.
In Italy the Abate Tornasi wrote a half-Hegelian, half-Catholic Æsthetic, wherein the beautiful is identified with the second person of the Trinity, the Word made man;[24] by this means he hoped to raise a bank of opposition against the liberal criticism of De Sanctis, whom he considered, from the sublime height of his own philosophy, as "a subtle grammarian." Combined Giobertian and German, especially Hegelian, influence produced several works of secondary importance; De Meis developed at length the thesis of the death of Art in the historical world.[25] Somewhat later Gallo also treated Æsthetic from the Hegelian point of view,[26] and others repeated, nearly word for word, the doctrines of Schasler and Hartmann on the overcoming of the Ugly.[27]
Antonio Tari and his lectures.