According to Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), beauty is that which is pleasant. Therefore beauty is defined by taste alone. The standard of true taste is that the maximum of richness, fullness, strength, and variety of impression should be contained in the narrowest limits. That is the ideal of a perfect work of art.
According to Burke (1729–1797—Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful), the sublime and beautiful, which are the aim of art, have their origin in the promptings of self-preservation and of society. These feelings, examined in their source, are means for the maintenance of the race through the individual. The first (self-preservation) is attained by nourishment, defence, and war; the second (society) by intercourse and propagation. Therefore self-defence, and war, which is bound up with it, is the source of the sublime; sociability, and the sex-instinct, which is bound up with it, is the source of beauty.15
Such were the chief English definitions of art and beauty in the eighteenth century.
During that period, in France, the writers on art were Père André and Batteux, with Diderot, D’Alembert, and, to some extent, Voltaire, following later.
According to Père André (Essai sur le Beau, 1741), there are three kinds of beauty—divine beauty, natural beauty, and artificial beauty.16
According to Batteux (1713–1780), art consists in imitating the beauty of nature, its aim being enjoyment.17 Such is also Diderot’s definition of art.
The French writers, like the English, consider that it is taste that decides what is beautiful. And the laws of taste are not only not laid down, but it is granted that they cannot be settled. The same view was held by D’Alembert and Voltaire.18
According to the Italian aesthetician of that period, Pagano, art consists in uniting the beauties’ dispersed in nature. The capacity to perceive these beauties is taste, the capacity to bring them into one whole is artistic genius. Beauty commingles with goodness, so that beauty is goodness made visible, and goodness is inner beauty.19
According to the opinion of other Italians: Muratori (1672–1750)—“Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le science e le arti,”—and especially Spaletti,20—“Saggio sopra la bellezza” (1765)—art amounts to an egotistical sensation, founded (as with Burke) on the desire for self-preservation and society.
Among Dutch writers, Hemsterhuis (1720–1790), who had an influence on the German aestheticians and on Goethe, is remarkable. According to him, beauty is that which gives most pleasure, and that gives most pleasure which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time. Enjoyment of the beautiful, because it gives the greatest quantity of perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest notion to which man can attain.21
Such were the aesthetic theories outside Germany during the last century. In Germany, after Winckelmann, there again arose a completely new aesthetic theory, that of Kant (1724–1804), which more than all others clears up what this conception of beauty, and consequently of art, really amounts to.
The aesthetic teaching of Kant is founded as follows:—Man has a knowledge of nature outside him and of himself in nature. In nature, outside himself, he seeks for truth; in himself he seeks for goodness. The first is an affair of pure reason, the other of practical reason (free-will). Besides these two means of perception, there is yet the judging capacity (Urteilskraft), which forms judgments without reasonings and produces pleasure without desire (Urtheil ohne Begriff und Vergnügen ohne Begehren). This capacity is the basis of aesthetic feeling. Beauty, according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is that which, in general and necessarily, without reasonings and without practical advantage, pleases. In its objective meaning it is the form of a suitable object in so far as that object is perceived without any conception of its utility.22
Beauty is defined in the same way by the followers of Kant, among whom was Schiller (1759–1805). According to Schiller, who wrote much on aesthetics, the aim of art is, as with Kant, beauty, the source of which is pleasure without practical advantage. So that art may be called a game, not in the sense of an unimportant occupation, but in the sense of a manifestation of the beauties of life itself without other aim than that of beauty.23
Besides Schiller, the most remarkable of Kant’s followers in the sphere of aesthetics was Wilhelm Humboldt, who, though he added nothing to the definition of beauty, explained various forms of it—the drama, music, the comic, etc.24
After Kant, besides the second-rate philosophers, the writers on aesthetics were Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their followers. Fichte (1762–1814) says that perception of the beautiful proceeds from this: the world—i.e. nature—has two sides: it is the sum of our limitations, and it is the sum of our free idealistic activity. In the first aspect the world is limited, in the second aspect it is free. In the first aspect every object is limited, distorted, compressed, confined—and we see deformity; in the second we perceive its inner completeness, vitality, regeneration—and we see beauty. So that the deformity or beauty of an object, according to Fichte, depends on the point of view of the observer. Beauty therefore exists, not in the world, but in the beautiful soul (schöner Geist). Art is the manifestation of this beautiful soul, and its aim is the education, not only of the mind—that is the business of the savant; not only of the heart—that is the affair of the moral preacher; but of the whole man. And so the characteristic of beauty lies, not in anything external, but in the presence of a beautiful soul in the artist.25
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