Sulzer.
The well-known Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste[[265]] of Sulzer, to which the often quoted Zusätze of Blankenberg belong as supplement, is in reality a painful compound of Dictionary and Bibliography, wherein you go from Copiren to Corinthische Ordnung, and from Menuet to Metalepsis. Such things, invaluable for their time, are almost necessarily thrown into the wallet at his back by Time himself. But they serve as a text for a repetition of the sober truth that the immense reputation and the really solid achievement of Germany since have been not a little due to the provision of them by her eighteenth-century writers.[writers.] Mere knowledge will not do everything: and it is peculiarly liable to degenerate into a simple rag-bag and marine-store accumulation of things that are not knowledge. But the average man can do very little without it; he can sometimes do quite surprising things with it. And while the less than average man is without it mainly negligible, it would be wofully easy to provide examples in which persons, certainly or possibly much above the average in ability, have made shipwreck by neglecting it.
Eberhard.
The Handbuch der Æsthetik[[266]] of Eberhard may deserve a line here, because, though beginning in the orthodox æsthetic manner with general Principles of Beauty, it works them down to specific Rhetoric and Poetry with rather more condescension, and a great deal more ingenuity, than usual.
France: the Père André, his Essai sur le Beau.
To pass to France, the Essai sur le Beau of the Père André[[267]] is almost a famous book, and undoubtedly exercised a great deal of influence over the time; nor must we deny that that influence had literary effects. But even a not hasty reader might be excused—if he came across the book having never previously heard of it—for saying that its connection with Literature is almost non-existent. The very word does not occur in the Index, which is rather fuller than in most French books of the time: and though “Eloquence” and “Poetry” do, the remarks in reference to them are of the most meagre character. There must be Unity: and the poet must please the imagination (Addison had at least taught them to use the word) as well as the intellect. Even “pleasure” is to be used with jealous care as a criterion of Beauty—the love of this is to be “disinterested.” But beyond these vague, as one might have thought barren, and in the last case theoretical generalities, André has next to nothing for the student of Literary Criticism, who may make what he can of the table of the Beautiful, as—
| Arbitrary, | Moral, | National, | Spiritual, |
| Essential, | Musical, | Sensible, | Visible. |
And it is well if this student has the grace to refrain from amplifying this table after the pattern and in the spirit of the twenty-eighth chapter of the Third Book of Rabelais.