De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus,
The thesis itself is to the expert a sufficient announcement of the new departure, which of course is only an old one re-fashioned. Baumgarten takes us right back to the most abstract criticism of the Italian Renaissance—the “idea of a poem,” the skeleton of poetic thought, method, expression, strung together by a new science of the sense of beauty. A poem is oratio sensitiva perfecta. What is poetical is that which contributes to this perfection.
and its definition of poetry.
The most fatal, and I am sure the most unintentionally fatal, criticism of Baumgarten, and incidentally of the entire division of critical or quasi-critical literature to which his work belongs, is contained in a remark of Herr Braitmaier’s (ii. 9) that part of the thesis “is written with very little understanding of poetry.” The question is whether the whole is not—whether this and other things like it might not have been said by a man who could not distinguish between Tupper and Tennyson, between Hugo and Delille. Look at this oratio sensitiva perfecta—which sent the good Herder into ecstasies as a new poetic spell, germ, and what not. Like other abstract definitions, including that of Coleridge himself, to which we shall come later, it omits or misses the differentia of Poetry altogether. It lets in the prose-poetry or the prose-better-than-poetry heretics by a wide and unclosable door:[[261]] it excludes the very quality which some of those who love poetry most love in it. What is “perfection” but the attainment, in the highest degree, of that which is elsewhere attained in degrees high, less high, low, or lowest? There are therefore orationes sensitivæ which have the qualities of poetry but are not poetry. This is hard to admit. Poetry should be itself: not a “bestment” of something else.
The Aletheophilus.
In the Aletheophilus, which followed (1741), Baumgarten expanded and, at the same time, condescended a little. A poem is now a “lively” oration instead of “sensitive” words, and so lively that it demands metrical expression. Herein he seems to his severer critics to have derogated. “Liveliness,” they say, was in sensitiva, only better: “metre” was in perfecta by implication. One can only say that we prefer to take it explicitly. And Baumgarten, like all other theorists with hardly an exception, grudges the admission of metre after all. He calculates that it gives only a very small proportion of the charm of poetry. True, the admission of it at all—with the further prescription of “thoughts that burn,” “brilliant order,” “regular,” that is to say, pure, neatly adjusted, adequate, and charming “expression,” does something to dress up the bare skeleton of the perfecta sensitiva oratio. But it does more to show what a bodiless skeleton it is. The Æsthetica. The Æsthetica itself,[[262]] which had been preceded by a sort of pilot-engine in the shape of a redaction of Baumgarten’s professorial lectures by his pupil, G. F. Meier,[[263]] expands, after a rather Vossian pattern, the principles of the two earlier books, dwelling much on “perfection,” on the innate disposition of the soul towards beautiful thoughts, and the like. He is perhaps most justly thanked for his insistence on sensitiva—on the sensual as well as intellectual appeal of poetry. But his illustration from actual ancient poetry is not rich: and that from modern almost non-existent.[[264]]
To Baumgarten we have given some place as to a pioneer even in a branch of criticism which we do not intend to pursue. His followers, Sulzer and Eberhard, must have less room, and Moses Mendelssohn, between them, is elsewhere treated.