[THE PRESENT CHAPTER ITSELF A KIND OF EXCURSUS]—[A PARABASIS ON “PHILOSOPHICAL” CRITICISM]-[MODERN ÆSTHETICS: THEIR FOUNT IN DESCARTES AND ITS BRANCHES]-[IN GERMANY: NEGATIVE AS WELL AS POSITIVE INDUCEMENTS]-[BAUMGARTEN]-[‘DE NONNULLIS AD POEMA PERTINENTIBUS’]-[AND ITS DEFINITION OF POETRY]-[THE ‘ALETHEOPHILUS’]-[THE ‘ÆSTHETICA’]-[SULZER]-[EBERHARD]-[FRANCE: THE PÈRE ANDRÉ, HIS ‘ESSAI SUR LE BEAU’]-[ITALY: VICO]-[HIS LITERARY PLACES]-[THE ’DE STUDIORUM RATIONE’]-[THE ’DE CONSTANTIA JURISPRUDENTIS’]-[THE FIRST ‘SCIENZA NUOVA’]-[THE SECOND]-[RATIONALE OF ALL THIS]-[A VERY GREAT MAN AND THINKER, BUT IN PURE CRITICISM AN INFLUENCE MALIGN OR NULL]-[ENGLAND]-[SHAFTESBURY]-[HUME]-[EXAMPLES OF HIS CRITICAL OPINIONS]-[HIS INCONSISTENCY]-[BURKE ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL]-[THE SCOTTISH ÆSTHETIC-EMPIRICS: ALISON]-[THE ‘ESSAY ON TASTE’]-[ITS CONFUSIONS]-[AND ARBITRARY ABSURDITIES]-[AN INTERIM CONCLUSION ON THE ÆSTHETIC MATTER.]
The present chapter itself a kind of excursus.
It was announced at the very opening of this History that it would not deal, except incidentally and under force majeure, with those vaguer problems of general Criticism or metacriticism which, during the last two centuries, have taken the general name of Æsthetics. A parabasis on “philosophical” criticism. But some of my critics have not been content with this announcement, and it is perhaps permissible in this place to notice certain exceptions which have been taken to the absence of—or rather to the pretty definite abstention from—“philosophical” discussions and speculations in this book. For while in Italy I have been pronounced digiuno di filosofia, the huntsmen have been up in America against my “confusion of thought” and my writing about Criticism without defining what criticism is.
As for the first point, I may perhaps be allowed to say that “divine Philosophy” has been by no means such a stranger or stepmother to me as some of my critics seem to suppose. I have duly sojourned in her courts, and have found them the reverse of unamiable: I have eaten of her bread and found it both palatable and nourishing. But it is Philosophy herself who teaches us, by the mouth of not her least but, as some have thought, her greatest exponent, not to shift or mix the Kinds. And, to my possibly heretical judgment, the “kind” of Criticism seems one into which such “general ideas” as my critics desiderate can only be introduced by a most doubtful and perilous naturalisation. I suppose it would be generally granted that no “philosophical” critics stand higher than Plato and Coleridge: Aristotle himself has, in comparison with them, but contented himself with middle axioms and empirical observation. And the result of this is that—again to my possibly heretical thinking—Plato has actually left us nothing in pure criticism but an often mischievous theory: while Coleridge is just so much the more barren in true criticism as he expatiates further in the regions of sheer “philosophy.”
Nor should I, if I chose to take up the quarrel, in the least lack other arms or armour of offence and defence, sufficiently proofmarked by Philosophy herself. I hold that the province of Philosophy is occupied by matters of the pure intellect: and that literary criticism is busied with matters which, though not in the loosest meaning, are matters of sense. I do not know—and I do not believe that any one knows, however much he may juggle with terms—why certain words arranged in certain order stir one like the face of the sea, or like the face of a girl, while other arrangements leave one absolutely indifferent or excite boredom or dislike. I know that we may generalise a little; may “push our ignorance a little farther back”; may discover some accordances of sound, some rhythmical adjustments, some cunning and more or less constant appeals to eye and ear which, as we coolly say, “explain” emotion and attraction to some extent. But why these general things delight man he knows no more than, in his more unsophisticated stage, why their individual cases and instances do so. I do not think that my own doctrine of the Poetic (or the literary) Moment—of the instant and mirific “kiss of the spouse”—is so utterly “unphilosophical”: but I do know that that doctrine, if it does not exactly laugh to scorn theories of æsthetic, makes them merely facultative indulgences. And just as physiology, and biology, and all the ’ologies that ever were ’ologied, leave you utterly uninformed as to the real reason of the rapture of the physical kiss, so I think that æsthetics do not teach the reason of the amorous peace of the Poetic Moment.
But I began this book with no intention of writing a treatise on Momentary (or Monochronous) Apolaustics, and except that it might have seemed discourteous to offer no explanation of (I can hardly call this any apology for) a feature, or the lack of one, which has disturbed well-willing readers, I should have preferred to keep such questions out altogether. Nor can I see that there is any “confusion of thought,” any contradiction, or even any want of “architectonic” in the plan which I have actually pursued. A man may surely write a History of England without including in it an abstract treatise on politics, and describe an interesting country without philosophising on the architecture of its buildings, the family story of its tribes, or the chemical constitution of its natural products. I set before myself and my readers at the outset the promise of a simple survey of the actual critical opinions, actually expressed, in “judging of authors,” by the actual critics of recorded literature. To the survey of these I have added another of the chief reasons which they alleged for their tastes when they alleged any: and when, as naturally happens, these opinions and tastes, and the attempted explanations of them, appeared in groups or schools, I have adapted my survey, by means of the Interchapters of the book, to the summary consideration of these also. I have not thought it incumbent on me either to express, or to refrain from expressing, agreement or disagreement with their views: but where (as in the case of the Subject theory, of Boileau’s Good-Sense-worship and other things) it seemed to me that certain views and theories could be actually demolished by argument, I have endeavoured to show how. Where it is a simple question of taste, my own Haupt-theorie forbids my attempting anything of the sort.
I am, I confess, unable to see that either Logic or Architectonic is outraged by this preannounced and methodical limitation of proceeding. I have given, or attempted to give, my “Atlas” of the actual facts with what accuracy and clearness I could. The complement of Theory I do not pretend to supply, and I cannot see that anybody has a right to demand it. Whoso wants to take it let him make it: my facts ought to help him in the making, and if they do not, he and not the facts must bear the blame. This book has attempted to provide, in an orderly arrangement, and, as far as might be in the space, exhaustively, what has called itself and has been called Criticism (certain varieties being, for reasons given, excluded or less fully treated) from the beginnings of Greek literature, as we have them, to the present day. Of these provisions I think I may say—without prejudice to any further use of them that any one may choose to make—his utere mecum: and I will just add that had anybody offered me the same provision thirty years ago, I should have been profoundly thankful, and have been spared many a weary hour of gleaning here and groping there.
I shall even be so very bold as to say that what I have actually done, or attempted to do, seems to me in the true sense both philosophoteron and spoudaioteron than what my censors would have liked me to do. Any tolerably clever undergraduate, reading for Greats, could sketch (in after-life amusing himself, and perhaps impressing others, by accumulating arguments in support, or in destruction, of his undergraduate hypothesis) explanations of the distaste of the ancients for “appreciative” criticism, of the critical silence of the Middle Ages, of the French and English attitude of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism and sixteenth-seventeenth century creation, of the time of bondage to Good Sense, of the avatars and phases of Taste. I would undertake myself to make a complete set in a Long Vacation, with arguments pro and con in the “best and most orgilous” manner. But I should not believe one of them, and I should mutter O vix sancta simplicitas! if anybody were taken in by them. In what I have given there is no possibility of taking in, and no need to believe or disbelieve. Here are the simple facts, disengaged by a certain amount of hard labour from their more or less accessible sources and quarries, and ranged, whether ill or well, yet at any rate with some system, and in such a fashion that they must be reasonably easy to master. I may not be an architect, but think I may claim to be a tolerable quarryman and a purveyor of the stone in fairly convenient arrangement, workably rough-hewed. And your most gifted architect will find himself put to it to make his Beauvais or his Batalha, his Salisbury or his Strasburg, from stone unquarried or unshaped to his hand. I have, in short, endeavoured to give a tolerably complete collection of facts which have never been collected before. If my facts are inconvenient to any philosophy, so much the worse for it: if they are convenient, let it take them and welcome.
At any rate—with what results of success or failure, of advantage or disadvantage to the work, the reader, not the writer, must judge,—my initial undertaking of abstinence has, I think, been fairly discharged. The point, however, at which we have arrived is one of those where the force majeure makes itself felt. In the Book where we aim at exhibiting the process of change which is so noticeable as between the general criticism of the eighteenth and the general criticism of the nineteenth centuries, and at examining to some extent the causes of that change, we could not possibly omit an influence so powerful for good or for evil as that of the constitution—as a regular branch of philosophy—of inquiries into the principles of Beauty, into the æsthetic sense, into the psychological aspects of the appeal of art generally. We shall still deal in the most economical and temperate fashion with these matters: but we cannot here abstain from them entirely. Indeed it might be open to anybody to urge that large passages occurring elsewhere in this volume, and even to some extent in the last, properly belong to the present chapter—that Lessing, Diderot, Du Bos are strayed sheep of this fold. But one remarkable person in France, another in Italy, and two still more remarkable groups in Germany and England, will find better place here than anywhere for something like individual notice: and others must be at least the subject of reference and glance.