The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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world, or which adverse fortune has withdrawn from one's own observation. Moreover, every work belongs to its age, to its nation, and to its environment, and depends upon particular historical and other ideas and aims. For this reason art-scholarship further requires a vast wealth of historical information of a very special kind, seeing that the individualized nature of the work of art is related to individual detail and demands special matter to aid in its comprehension and elucidation. And lastly, this kind of scholarship not only needs, like every other, a memory for information, but a vivid imagination in order to retain distinctly the images of artistic forms in all their different features, and especially in order to have them present to the mind for purposes of comparison with other works.
(b) Within this kind of consideration, which is primarily historical, there soon emerge various points of view which cannot be lost sight of in contemplating a work of art, inasmuch as our judgments must be derived from them. Now these points of view, as in other sciences which have an empirical starting-point, when extracted and put together form universal criteria and rules, and, in a still further stage of formal generalization, Theories of the arts. This is not the place to go into detail about literature of this kind, and it may, therefore, suffice to mention a few writings in the most general way. For instance, there is Aristotle's "Poetics," the theory of tragedy contained in which is still of interest; and to speak more particularly, among the ancients, Horace's "Ars Poetica" and Longinus's "Treatise on the Sublime" suffice to give a general idea of the way in which this kind of theorizing has been carried on. The general formulæ which were abstracted by such writers were meant to stand especially as precepts and rules, according to which, particularly in times of degeneration of poetry and art, works of art were meant to be produced. The prescriptions, however, compiled by these physicians of art had even less assured success than those of physicians whose aim was the restoration of health.
Respecting theories of this kind, I propose merely to mention that, though in detail they contain much that is instructive, yet their remarks were abstracted from a very limited circle of artistic productions, which passed for the genuinely beautiful ones, but yet always belonged to a but narrow range of art. And again, such formulæ are in part very trivial reflections which in their generality proceed to no establishment of particulars, although this is the matter of chief concern.
The above-mentioned Horatian epistle is full of these reflections, and, therefore, is a book for all men, but one which for this very reason contains much that amounts to nothing, e.g.—
"Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci
Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo"—
"He carries all votes, who has mingled the pleasant and the useful, by at once charming and instructing his reader." This is just like so many copybook headings,[32] e.g. "Stay at home and earn an honest livelihood," which are right enough as generalities, but lack the concrete determinations on which action depends.
Another kind of interest was found, not in the express aim of directly causing the production of genuine works of art, but in the purpose which emerged of influencing men's judgment upon works of art by such theories, in short of forming taste. In this aspect, Home's "Elements of Criticism," the writings of Batteux, and Ramler's "Introduction to the Fine Arts," were works much read in their day. Taste in this sense has to do with arrangement and treatment, the harmony and finish of what belongs to the external aspect of a work of art. Besides, they brought in among the principles of taste views that belonged to the psychology that was then in vogue, and that had been drawn from empirical observation of capacities and activities of the soul, of the passions and their probable heightening, succession, etc. But it remains invariably the case that every man judges works of art, or characters, actions, and incidents according to the measure of his insight and his feelings; and as that formation of taste only touched what was meagre and external, and moreover drew its precepts only from a narrow range of works of art and from a borné culture of intellect and feelings, its whole sphere was inadequate, and incapable of seizing the inmost and the true, and of sharpening the eye for the apprehension thereof.
Such theories proceed in general outline, as do the remaining non-philosophic sciences. The content which they subject to consideration is borrowed from our idea of it, as something found there; then further questions are asked about the nature of this idea, inasmuch as a need reveals itself for closer determinations, which are also found in our idea of the matter, and drawn from it to be fixed in definitions. But in so doing, we find ourselves at once on uncertain and debatable ground. It might indeed appear at first as if the beautiful were a perfectly simple idea. But it soon becomes evident that manifold sides may be found in it, one of which is emphasized by one writer and another by another, or, even if the same points of view are adopted, a dispute arises on the question which side after all is to be regarded as the essential one.
With a view to such questions it is held a point of scientific completeness to adduce and to criticize the various definitions of the beautiful. We will do this neither with historical exhaustiveness, so as to learn all the subtleties which have emerged in the defining process, nor for the sake of the historical interest; but we will simply produce by way of illustration, some of the more interesting modern views which come pretty close in their purport to what in fact the idea of the beautiful does involve. For such purpose we have chiefly to mention Goethe's account of the beautiful, which Meyer embodied in his "History of the Formative Arts[33] in Greece," on which occasion he also brings forward Hirt's view, though without mentioning him.
Hirt, one of the greatest of genuine connoisseurs in the present day, in his brochure about artistic beauty (Horen,[34] 1797, seventh number), after speaking of the beautiful in the several arts, sums up his ideas in the result that the basis of a just criticism of beauty in art and of the formation of taste is the conception of the Characteristic. That is to say, he defines the beautiful as the "perfect, which is or can be an object of eye, ear, or imagination." Then he goes on to define the perfect as "that which is adequate to its aim, that which nature or art aimed at producing within the given genus and species[35] in the formation of the object." For which reason, in order to form our judgment on a question of beauty, we ought to direct our observation as far as possible to the individual marks which constitute a definite essence. For it is just these marks that form its characteristics. And so by character as the law of art he means "that determinate individual modification[36] whereby forms, movement and gesture, bearing and expression, local colour, light and shade, chiaroscuro[37] and attitude distinguish themselves, in conformity, of course, with the requirements of an object previously selected." This formula gives us at once something more significant than the other definitions. If we go on to ask what "the characteristic" is, we see that it involves in the first place a content, as, for instance, a particular feeling, situation, incident, action, individual; and secondly, the mode and fashion in which this content is embodied in a representation. It is to this, the mode of representation, that the artistic law of the "characteristic" refers, inasmuch as it requires that every particular element in the mode of expression shall subserve the definite indication of its content and be a member in the expression of that content. The abstract formula of the characteristic thus has reference to the degree of appropriateness with which the particular detail of the artistic form sets in relief the content which it is intended to represent. If we desire to illustrate this conception in a quite popular way, we may explain the limitation which it involves as follows. In a dramatic work, for instance, an action forms the content; the drama[38] is to represent how this action takes place. Now, men and women do all sorts of things; they speak to each other from time to time, at intervals they eat, sleep, put on their clothes, say one thing and another, and so forth. But in all this, whatever does not stand in immediate connection with that particular action considered as the content proper, is to be excluded, so that in reference to it nothing may be without import. So, too, a picture, that only represented a single phase of that action, might yet include in it—so wide are the ramifications of the external world—a multitude of circumstances, persons, positions, and other matters which at that moment have no reference to the action in question, and are not subservient to its distinctive character.
But, according to the rule of the characteristic, only so much ought to enter into the work of art as belongs to the display[39] and,