These, however, might be due to “the act of God,” to sheer want of the quality on which the essay is written. A large part of the second volume exhibits the perils of that Castle Dangerous, the “half-way house,” unmistakably and inexcusably. Alison is dealing with the interesting but ticklish subject of human beauty, and, like Burke, is justly sarcastic on the “four noses from chin to breast,” “arm and a half from this to that” style of measurement. But he is himself still an abject victim of the type-theory. Beauty must suit the type; and its characteristics must have a fixed qualitative value—blue eyes being expressive of softness, dark complexions of melancholy, and so on. But here he is comparatively sober.[[323]] Later he indulges in the following: “The form of the Grecian nose is said to be originally beautiful, ... and in many cases it is undoubtedly so. Apply, however, this beautiful form to the countenance of the Warrior, the Bandit, the Martyr, or to any which is meant to express deep or powerful passion, and the most vulgar spectator would be sensible of dissatisfaction, if not of disgust.” Let us at least be thankful that Alison has freed us from being “the most vulgar spectator.” Why the Warrior, why the Martyr, why the deep and powerful man, should not have a Grecian nose I fail to conceive: but the incompatibility of a Bandit and a straight profile lands me in profounder abysses of perplexity. The artillery and the blue horse must yield their pride of place: the reason in that instance is, if not exquisite, instantly discernible. But nothing in all Neo-classic arbitrariness from Scaliger to La Harpe seems to me to excel or equal the Censure of the Bandit with the Grecian Nose as a monstrous Bandit, a disgustful object, hateful not merely to the elect but to the very vulgar.[[324]]
An interim conclusion on the æsthetic matter.
Let us hear the conclusion of this whole æsthetic matter. Any man of rather more than ordinary intelligence—perhaps any man of ordinary intelligence merely—who has been properly educated from his youth up (as all men who show even a promise of ordinary intelligence should have been) in ancient and modern philosophy, who knows his Plato, his Aristotle, and his neo-Platonists, his Scholastics, his moderns from Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes downwards, can, if he has the will and the opportunity, compose a theory of æsthetics. That is to say, he can, out of the natural appetite towards poetry and literary delight which exists in all but the lowest and most unhappy souls, and out of that knowledge of concrete examples thereof which exists more or less in all, excogitate general principles and hypotheses, and connect them with immediate and particular examples, to such an extent as the Upper Powers permit or the Lower Powers prompt. If he has at the same time—a happy case of which the most eminent example up to the present time is Coleridge—a concurrent impulse towards actual “literary criticism,” towards the actual judgment of the actual concrete examples themselves, this theory may more or less help him, need at any rate do him no great harm. Mais celà n’est pas nécessaire, as was said of another matter; and there are cases, many of them in fact, where the attention to such things has done harm.
For after all, once more Beyle, as he not seldom did, reached the flammantia mœnia mundi when he said, in the character of his “Tourist” eidolon, “En fait de beau chaque homme a sa demi-aune.” Truth is not what each man troweth: but beauty is to each man what to him seems beautiful. You may better the seeming:—the fact is at the bottom of all that is valuable in the endlessly not-valuable chatter about education generally, and it excuses, to a certain extent, the regularity of Classicism, the selfish “culture” of the Goethean ideal, the extravagances of the ultra-Romantics. But yet
“A God, a God, the severance ruled,”
and you cannot bridge the gulfs that a God has set by any philosophastering theory.[[325]]
Yet although all this is, according to my opinion at least, absolutely true; although literary criticism has not much more to do with æsthetics than architecture has to do with physics and geology—than the art of the wine-taster or the tea-taster has to do with the study of the papillæ of the tongue and the theory of the nervous system generally, or with the botany of the vine and the geology of the vineyard; although, finally, as we have seen and shall see, the most painful and earnest attention to the science of the beautiful appears to be compatible with an almost total indifference to concrete judgment and enjoyment of the beautiful itself, and even with egregious misjudgment and failure to enjoy,—yet we cannot extrude this other scienza nuova altogether, if only because of the almost inextricable entanglement of its results with those of criticism proper. And it is more specially to be dealt with in this particular place because, beyond all question, the direction of study to these abstract inquiries did contribute to the freeing of criticism from the shackles in which it had lain so long. Any new way of attention to any subject is likely to lead to the detection of errors in the old: and as the errors of Neo-classicism were peculiarly arbitrary and irrational, the “high priori way” did certainly give an opportunity of discovering them from its superior height—the most superfluous groping among preliminaries and foundations gave a chance of unearthing the roots of falsehood. As in the old comparison Saul found a kingdom when he sought for his father’s asses, so it was at least possible for a man, while he was considering whether poetry is an oratio sensitiva perfecta, or whether there is a separate Logic of Phantasy, to have his eyes suddenly opened to the fact that Milton was not merely a fanatic and fantastic, with a tendency to the disgusting, and that Shakespeare was something more than an “abominable” mountebank.
[257]. The standard treatise on this is that of M. E. Krantz, L’Esthétique de Descartes: Paris, 1882.