Modern Æsthetics: their fount in Descartes and its branches.

With the minor differences which, occurring in all matters of opinion, nowhere multiply so fast and subdivide themselves so minutely as in questions of philosophy, there has been of late a general agreement to trace the germ of the modern division of Æsthetics to Descartes.[[257]] To discuss this at any length would be quite improper here: but no one who has the least acquaintance with the Cartesian philosophy can fail to see how naturally—nay, how inevitably—both the general principle of that philosophy in its reduction and rallying of everything to conditions of abstract idea and thought, and its particular insistence on clearness of definition and the like in Method, should lead to a reconsideration and further exploration of the idea of Beauty, literary and other. There is also no doubt that, in the next generation or generations, the developments of Cartesianism and the revolts against it might, nay, must, affect powerfully these applications of abstract thought to the remoter principles of literature. We have seen that Locke in England, Philistine as he himself was in regard to letters, and especially to poetry, had a very strong influence upon Addison,—an influence which he continued to exercise, both through Addison and independently, almost throughout the English eighteenth century. There is no doubt that in France the Père André, whom we shall mention presently, was a direct descendant of Descartes through Malebranche. In Italy the singular and solitary figure of Vico, though it exercised at first no influence, has been claimed as having a new and powerful influence to exercise in this direction as in others. And it is not disputable that Descartes begat Leibnitz or that Leibnitz begat Wolff, to whose philosophical system almost all competent judgment agrees in tracing the direct origin of German æsthetic, in Breitinger, in Baumgarten, and the rest.

In Germany: negative as well as positive inducements.

It is, I think, Herr von Antoniewicz, the very learned and able editor of J. E. Schlegel, who accounts[[258]] for the strong abstract and æsthetic tendency of German eighteenth-century criticism, both then and since, by the fact that the originators of it had nothing to look back upon, nothing to “tie themselves on to,” and that they therefore struck out into the deep, ripæ ulterioris amore, as we may say, to tag his saying. This is ingenious, and it becomes more illuminative when we compare the facts with the corresponding facts in English criticism. We, too, though we had in Dryden and Jonson a good deal more than the Germans had, possessed little critical starting-point. But we had, what the Germans had not, abundance of really great writers upon whom to fix practical and real critical examinations. It is half pathetic and half ludicrous to see the efforts that Bodmer and Gottsched and their contemporaries make to provide themselves with subjects of the kind out of people like Besser and Neukirch and Amthor, like Lohenstein and Hofmanswaldau, even like the excellent Opitz: and we cannot wonder that they, or at least others, dropped off these unsucculent subjects into the pure inane. But the fairer Callipolis of English criticism could feed and grow fat on Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Dryden always, and by degrees on all the recovered wealth of older English literature. The Germans had nothing (save Luther and a few more not of the absolutely first class or even a very high second) but that mediæval literature and those ballads which naturally they did not reach at once. And even these, much good as they did them, had not the inestimable alterative value of older as compared with newer English literature.

Baumgarten.

On the other hand, they had, as we have said, an unconquerable desire and a dogged determination to learn and to improve themselves: the very poverty of their own literature drove them to compare and abstract others; and they possessed, in the Wolffian philosophy, a strong and serviceable instrument of method. Breitinger, with whom we have dealt sufficiently in his general critical aspect, may perhaps have the credit of the first distinct and extensive attempt to busy himself with the theory of art and letters: to Baumgarten is always attributed that of having put the name “Æsthetic” into currency, and of having got the thing—if it may be called a thing—into formal and regular shape. He used the word in a thesis, De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus,[[259]] as early as 1735, about midway between the time when the Zürich men turned their attention seriously to poetry and imagination in the abstract, and the issue of their main body of work in 1740-41. But it was not till fifteen years later, at the exact middle of the century, that he began to publish his Æsthetica,[[260]] redacted from lectures delivered in the interval.