of painting be lines and colors in space, and the means of poetry articulate words in time, then evidently painting most properly addresses itself to the treatment of stationary bodies, and poetry to the treatment of successive actions; so that the attempt, carried too far, to represent actions in painting and to describe bodies in poetry is a perversion of the legitimate means of painting and poetry. We should not forget the qualifications that Lessing made to this rigid principle, nor the fact that he published only the first part of his projected treatise. He referred the effect of painting as well as of poetry to the imagination. But his purpose was to establish boundaries determinable by the difference in artistic means; and his "Laocoön" is a rationalistic document based upon knowledge and observation of external facts, not upon a study of internal reactions. BURKE Among the many predecessors of Lessing in the realm of asthetic speculation, two men, not philosophers by profession, are conspicuous for attention to the personal phenomena which he did not much consult; the Abbé Dubos in France and Edmund Burke' in England. Dubos recognizes differences in the arts conditioned by their symbols of expression; but he compares and rates the arts according to their effect upon the senses, and so prepares the way for a purely impressionistic criticism. Burke did not agree with the Frenchman's ratings, nor did he in any manner imitate his book, however much he respected it; but he was in substantial agreement with Dubos as to the operation of æsthetic causes; and just as Dubos saw in the desire of the mind to be stimulated by something the prime motive for interest in the arts, Burke found in two of our strongest passions, love and terror, a definition of the chief ends of artistic endeavor, the beautiful and the sublime. Burke was not much affected by painting. This art, the aim of which is to represent the beautiful, has, he says, little effect on our passions. But poetry, to which he was sensitive, and which, he holds, does not depend for its effect upon the power of raising sensible images, is capable of stirring the passions with a vague sense of the sublime, and is, strictly speaking, not an art of imitation. 1 Harvard Classics, xxiv, 11ff. 2 H. C., xxiv, 29ff. BAUMGARTEN Though reached by a different process, Burke's conclusion as to the province of poetry is, in its negative aspect, identical with Lessing's: words are ill adapted to the vivid presentation of objects by means of detailed description. And though crude and materialistic, his "Inquiry" is an excellent introduction to the study of æsthetics as a branch of psychology. The real founder of this science, however, and the philosopher from whom it derives its name, was a contemporary of Burke's in Germany, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Adopting the monistic system of Leibnitz and Wolf, Baumgarten, a clear thinker and a lover of poetry, but no connoisseur of the formative arts, undertook to fill the gap left by his forerunners in the logic of the lower powers of the soul, that is, the senses. His theory of the beautiful is general; he defines beauty as the perfection of sensuous perception; but clinging to the maxim, "Like picture, like poetry," he does not, in his application of the theory, progress far beyond the treatment of poetry as the typical art, rating it, like Burke, higher than painting. Poetry he defines as perfect sensuous speech. So Milton says that poetry is more simple, sensuous, and passionate than prose. And that perfection which is the definition of beauty and of poetry is a set of harmonious relationships in the object and between the object and the sensitive soul, of which the intellect may take cognizance, but of which, above all, the senses make us conscious, being impressed with an extensive clearness separable from intensive distinctness; so that a poem is a poem not for the accuracy of any "imitation," nor for the loftiness of its idea, nor for the elegance of its forms, but for the fullness of its appeal to those functions which most immediately respond to man's contact with his material environment; that is to say, for intuitively perceptible reality. SCHILLER Baumgarten's doctrine was taken up by Lessing's friend, Mendelssohn; it furnished fundamental presuppositions for "Laocoön"; and it persisted to the time of Kant and Schiller. Kant, the analyst and rationalist, tended to separate the spheres of reason, sense, and morals, and to refer all three to subjective judgment. But Schiller,3 his disciple, fired as he was by moral enthusiasm, wished to find an objective foundation for a theory of the beautiful that should make æsthetics a mediator between science and ethics, and should give to the beautiful the sanction of a perfecter of the mind, the heart, and the will. Not unlike Lessing, whose "Education of the Human Race" meant a gradual liberation from leading strings and final reliance upon trained natural faculties, Schiller conceived æsthetic education as a process of freeing man from bondage to the senses and leading him through culture to a state of more perfect nature, in which, as of old among the Greeks, truth and goodness shall be garbed in beauty. Civilization has been won through specialization, division of labor; it is a gain for the community, but at the loss of harmonious development of powers in the individual life. The beautiful soul longs to restore the balance. If this be impossible in the world of actuality, it is attainable in the world of appearance. There the mind is free to follow the image of beauty and to endow this image with the wealth of all its knowledge and all its goodness— not for any ulterior purpose, but in obedience to a native impulse. And so the poet is the sole modern representative of perfect humanity, with all his powers, intellectual, sensuous, and moral, cooperating toward the realization of an ideal. 3 H. C., xxxii, 209ff. 4 H. C., xxxii, 185ff. See also Goethe's "Introduction to the Propyläen," xxxix, 264ff, and Hume, "On the Standard of Taste," xxvii, 203. V. THE COMPOSITION OF A CRITICISM BY DR. ERNEST BERNBAUM F THE critical essays not discussed in the previous lectures the most important are those by Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Taine, and Mazzini. As their doctrines are quite obviously related to those expounded in the foregoing pages, it seems desirable to consider here the manner in which their opinions are expressed. The critical essays published in this series are classics, not merely because they contain significant doctrines about literature but also because they are in themselves literary works. They confer pleasure as well as profit. What distinguishes them from the journalistic book review on the one hand, and the pedantic study on the other, is their artistic composition. By what methods are their artistic effects produced? A DOMINANT IDEA The title of a work cited by Sainte-Beuve suggests what a literary criticism should not be. It runs as follows: "Michel de Montaigne, a collection of unedited or little-known facts about the author of the Essays, his book and other writings, about his family, his friends, his admirers, his detractors." Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and the other masters never present us with a "collection." They marshal their numerous facts into a system, and dominate them with a thought which, however complex, is coherent. Most of us arise from the perusal of an author with a chaotic throng of impressions. But in the mind of a true literary critic the chaos becomes order. Renan, in his "Poetry of the Celtic Races," "giving a voice to races that are no more," lets us hear not a confusion of tongues but an intelligible unity of national utterance-sad, gentle, and imaginative. Hugo, 1 Harvard Classics, xxxii, 137. surveying in his "Preface to Cromwell" the highly intricate romantic movement, sees therein the harmonious union of the grotesque and the sublime. Sainte-Beuve answers his sweeping question, "What is a Classic?" with the succinct definition-a work that reveals in a beautiful and individual manner an eternal truth or emotion. Mazzini characterizes Byron as a subjective individualist, and Goethe as an objective one. Taine, prefacing his "History of English Literature," unlocks the riddle of literary growth with the keys "race, environment, and epoch." The truth of these doctrines does not for the moment concern us. What is important for us is that each of these long essays may be summed up in a single sentence; for in each a powerful mind grasps and expresses a single idea. When a critic has conceived the leading idea of his essay, he is still in danger of obscuring its presentation. The more richly informed he is, the more he is tempted to introduce facts not strictly related to his dominant thought. But the great critical essayists, resisting that temptation, subordinate all details to the general design. Hugo, in sketching the development of the world's literature, selects only those phases which forecast the timeliness of romanticism. Sainte-Beuve and Mazzini, in dealing with the lives of Montaigne' and Byron, which offer many opportunities for recounting interesting but irrelevant incidents, mention only those which illustrate their conception of the authors. METHODICAL ARRANGEMENT In the arrangement of the materials, the same conscious art is observable. Each of the sections of the essays of Taine and Renan is a firm and necessary foundation for those that succeed it. Not until Renan has described the secluded national existence of the Celts does he draw the resultant national traits of character, which thereupon we are ready to trace intelligently in the various branches of Celtic literature. The method of Taine's essay is even more admirably logical. To understand the growth of literature, he tells us, we must know first "the visible man," next "the invisible man,” then the race, environment, and epoch which determined his char 3 H. C., xxxix, 410. 5 H. C., xxxii, 377. |