In the æsthetic section,[[1031]] main and appended, of his great book itself, Schopenhauer concerns us less. It may be quite true[[1032]] that the subjective part of æsthetic pleasure is delight in perceptive knowledge, independent of Will; and the bass may be “the lowest grade of the objectification” of the said Will. But according to the views, perhaps wrongly but constantly maintained in this book, positions of this kind have nothing to do with the discovery or the defence of any concrete critical judgment whatsoever. We find of course—as we must find in any man of Schopenhauer’s powerful intellect and wide knowledge—divers interesting aperçus, not always or often conditioned by a tame consistency. Thus[[1033]] he dislikes rhyme altogether, but sees, as not everybody since has seen, and as comparatively few had seen before him, the beauty of rhymed Mediæval Latin. The passage on the sublimity of silence and solitude is an extremely fine one: and if his general quarrel with the world puts him in an unnecessary temper with minor poets,[[1034]] it is interesting to compare his attack on them with Castelvetro’s.[[1035]] It would be very interesting, too, to compare and connect his views on Poetry with his very celebrated opinions on Love: but non nostrum est.[[1036]] And it is only when Schopenhauer touches ethics that he is disputable; on æsthetic questions in the applied sense he seldom goes wrong, and is always stimulating and original to the highest degree.
Grillparzer.
Our “surprise” is the Austrian poet, Grillparzer.[[1037]] I am told by persons who know more about that matter than I do, that Grillparzer was a remarkable playwright; I am sure that he is a remarkable critic. Four volumes of his Works are devoted to this subject, and nearly the whole of one of them[[1038]] is occupied by critical pensées and aphorisms of the kind in which Joubert is the great master. Grillparzer is not the equal of the Frenchman, nor has he the depth of his countryman Novalis: but his critical matter is more abundant than the latter’s, and it is of a rather more practical kind. He seems, at all times of his long life, to have practised, and he has explicitly, preached, what I myself believe to be certainly the most excellent if not the only excellent way of criticism. His motto in criticism. The delivery unto Satan of all theory, which I have put in the forefront of this Book, is of course intentionally hyperbolical: yet what he puts in the forefront of his own is quite sober. “My plan in these annotations is, without any regard to system, to write down on each subject what seems to me to flow out of its own nature. The resultant contradictions will either finally clear themselves away, or, being irremovable, will show me that no system is possible.” I am by no means sure that this was not the practice of Aristotle; it pretty certainly was that of Longinus; I have endeavoured to show that, pursued as it was by Dryden all through his literary life, it made him a very great critic; and it was to no very small extent (though in his case it was hampered and broken into by his fatal inconsecutiveness) the method also of Coleridge. Grillparzer had not the genius of these men: but he seems to have pursued his own method faithfully for some fifty or sixty years, and the result is some mediate axioms of very considerable weight, and a large body of individual judgments which are at least of interest.
His results in aphorism,
The former are perhaps the better. He has even attempts at the definition of Beauty, which are as good as another’s, holding that the Beautiful not merely gives satisfaction and appeasement to the sensual part in us, but also lifts up the soul.[[1039]] This, at least, escapes the witty judgment of Burke quoted above, after Schlegel. He has the combined boldness and good sense[[1040]] to see and say that “Sense is prose”—to cry woe on the poetry that can be fully explained by the understanding. He has dealt a swashing blow[[1041]] at a terribly large part of ancient and modern criticism in the words, “Pottering, [“Schlendrian,”] and Pedantry in Art always delight in judging by Kinds—approving this and denouncing that. But an open Art—sense knows no Kinds: only individuals.” He is interesting and distinctly original on Dilettanteism:[[1042]] stigmatises in women (I fear he might have added not a few men) the “inability to admire what you do not wholly approve,”[[1043]] and says plumply,[[1044]] Klassisch ist fehlerfrei, a proposition which begs the question as little as any on a question that is always begged.
Nearly all his aphorisms on poetry and prose blend neatness and adequacy well, as this:[[1045]] “Prose and Poetry are like a journey and a walk. The object of the journey lies at its end: of the walk, in the walking.” Nay, he is blunter still, and to some people perhaps quite shocking, in comparing the two to eating and drinking.[[1046]] A text for a weighty critical sermon might, I think, be found in an aphorism of his,[[1047]] which is not easy to translate into English without periphrasis: and though he does not often venture upon the complicatedly figurative, there is another[[1048]] about Islands which I wish Mr Arnold had known, that he might have given us a pendant to Isolation. In fact, in these meditations of his, Grillparzer, though never pretentiously Delphic, is always for thoughts.
and in individual judgment.