It is no doubt a little ironic that we must begin our examination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetics by recalling the philosophy of Descartes, whose volumes of writings nowhere present even the sketch of an aesthetic theory. Apart from his early Compendium Musicae (1618), Descartes hardly refers to beauty or the arts. Yet in aesthetics, as in nearly every other branch of philosophy during these two centuries, his philosophical ideas were highly influential. Where we cannot demonstrate that certain aesthetic theories were in fact derived indirectly from his principles and methods, we can at least show that, logically speaking, they belong to a family of ideas for which the period was notable, and of which Descartes was the outstanding philosophical representative, if not the actual progenitor.
The ideals of knowledge that Descartes formed by reflection upon arithmetic and geometry, and promised a universal application, stamped themselves indelibly upon the consciousness of his age. Though the uncompleted Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (written about 1628) were not published until after his death, the Discours de la Méthode (1637) was one of the most memorable epistemological manifestoes. As regards concepts, Descartes proposed by analysis to discover the essentially simple, and therefore utterly clear and distinct, ideas, which should be the basic ingredients of knowledge. And as regards propositions, he took intuition and deduction as his sources of necessary truth, an intuition being “the undoubting conception of an unclouded and attentive mind” that “springs from the light of reason alone”1—and a deduction being, in effect, a chain of intuitions. One of Descartes’ most important claims was to have discovered a method that anyone can use to get at indubitable and universal truth—universal both in that it would be valid for all rational beings and in that it would hold of everything, or everything in a given field of inquiry.
Thus Descartes’ method was a priori and abstract. The kind of knowledge he was after could not be expected from an empirical investigation of nature; it had to rest on innate concepts and propositions that commend themselves directly to the “natural light.” And its security as knowledge would be attested not only by its evident clearness but by its deductive systematization, with the more fundamental and less fundamental propositions arranged so as to exhibit their logical dependences. The ideal of a Cartesian knowledge spread across Europe, and the hope of attaining it arose in many fields, including the study of the arts. It is true that Descartes himself, in the Discours (Part I), said he thought that Poetry and Eloquence were “gifts of the mind rather than fruits of study” (p. 85), native talents rather than rational arts; nevertheless, theorists who were closer than he to the actual problems of poets, painters, composers, or critics were moved to see whether even these refractory subjects (however hopelessly unmethodical they might seem) could be conquered by Reason.
POETICS
L’art poétique (1674) of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux is perhaps the most perfect expression of the Cartesian spirit in poetic theory. Reason, good sense, intelligibility—these are essential and basic, he tells the poet:
Love reason then: and let what e’er you Write
Borrow from her its Beauty, Force, and Light.
[Canto I, lines 37–38; trans. Soame]
Aimez donc la Raison—yes. But also: Que la Nature donc soit vostre étude unique:
You then, that would the Comic Lawrels wear,
To study Nature be your only care
[Canto III, lines 359–60]
And this holds for the tragic as well as the comic, art. Nature is the universal underlying the particular, the reality behind the appearance. Nature, in this sense, and Reason are intrinsically allied; the rules of following either are the same.
Would you in this great Art acquire Renown?
Authors, observe the Rules I here lay down.
In prudent Lessons every where abound,
With pleasant, joyn the useful and the sound.
[Canto IV, lines 85–88]
In the same spirit, René Le Bossu began his Traité du poème épique (1675) by remarking:
The arts have this in common with the sciences, that the former like the latter are founded on reason and that in the arts one should allow himself to be guided by the lights which nature has given us [Book I, ch. 1].
And “Nature” is again the key word in Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), the most concentrated statement of neoclassical critical theory.
First follow NATURE, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same:
Unerring NATURE, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang’d, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of Art.
. . .
Those RULES of old discovered, not devis’d,
Are nature still, but Nature methodiz’d:
Nature, like Monarchy, is but restrain’d
By the same Laws which first herself ordain’d.
[Part I, lines 68–73, 88–91; cf. 130–40]
The subtleties and complexities of these two concepts, Nature and Reason, as they permeated the thinking of the Enlightenment, are enormously difficult to unravel, and only an outline of the story can be given here. The high point of Aristotle’s prestige, and of the respect accorded his doctrines, came in the seventeenth century, but the seventeenth-century theorists were, in general, no longer content to cite him as an authority; they believed that his conclusions could be rationally justified, and indeed given more solid support than was provided in the extant passages of the Poetics. One principle (or definition) was taken as axiomatic: that poetry is an imitation of human action. But this idea had now to be developed and systematized, with the help of the emerging concept of Nature. The clue was taken from the Poetics: poetry is universal, whereas history is particular.
Reason, said Aristotle, grasps the universal in the particular, which is to say it begins to understand when it locates the individual thing in the class, or species, to which it properly belongs—for a class is identified by the universal which its members share. Taking “nature” in its broadest sense, for all that confronts us, including human and nonhuman creatures and things, what strikes us most of all, it was argued, is the way in which they fall into distinct and definite groups. Each group has not only its defining universals, constituting the “nature” of its members, but it also has typical or ideal or unusually representative members: the first-rate horse who exhibits better than others the character of its species. Thus a number of important ideas come to be mingled together in the concept of Nature: the statistically frequent, the essential, the fundamental, the typical, the characteristic, the normal, the ideal. Of these notions, the statistically frequent is not central in the thinking of the neoclassical theorists: when Boileau advises the comic writer to study the mores of men, he does not mean just what they usually do, though that is perhaps part of it; the poet must “discern the hidden secrets of the heart” and depict
The Jealous Fool, the fawning Sycophant,
A Sober Wit, an enterprising Ass
[Canto III, lines 363–4]
or in Boileau’s words,
un Prodigue, un Avare,
Un Honneste homme, un Fat, un Jaloux, un Bizarre
—essential types of common humanity, not individuals remarkable for their uniqueness.
This is Aristotle’s principle of universality in its neoclassical transformation: the aim of the poet is to provide, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “just representations of general Nature” (Preface to Shakespeare, 1765). The pervasiveness of this principle in neoclassical theory can be copiously illustrated, but for our purpose that is not necessary. Its implications are best revealed in the words of Johnson, who gave it one of its latest—and most forceful—formulations. Johnson’s best-known passage is from Rasselas (1759):
The business of a poet . . . is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip . . . [ch. 10].
Shakespeare’s characters are praised for their universality, not their individuality (Preface to Shakespeare), and Cowley is censured because he “loses the grandeur of generality” by his “scrupulous enumeration” (Life of Cowley, pars. 58, 133; cf. Rambler No. 36).
“The grandeur of generality” is a significant phrase. To deal, in poetry or drama, with a universal trait of human nature, or a trait typical of a certain class of men (however the class may be defined) is at once to reveal something importantly true about human nature and to bring it forcibly and movingly to mind, in a way that would be weakened by detailed dwelling upon idiosyncratic features. And it is also to touch the common springs of humanity in a wide audience, and thus please and instruct most successfully. This is the neoclassical theory that accords generality its poetic power.
Because the end of poetry can be exactly stated, the neoclassical theorists held, there can be a science of its means. It should be in principle possible to discover and draw up a set of general rules by reference to which a good poem can be successfully constructed and a faulty poem be proved bad—perhaps even a “poetical scale” of measurement such as Goldsmith later attempted (Roger de Piles had made a similar scale for paintings). The doctrine of the rules—especially the three alleged Aristotelian rules of tragedy, as formulated by Scaliger—came into its own in the seventeenth century. And it brought into the heart of aesthetics the epistemological conflict of the Enlightenment: between the rival claims of reason and experience. As this controversy was carried on by the theorists of poetry, it seldom rose to a very high level; they did not, on the whole, learn enough from the philosophers, and there were too many vested interests, personal and national, as well as mixed loyalties (to Aristotle, to the Muse, to the box office), to make for easy and rational discussion.
Consider, for example, the three Discourses of Corneille (1660), which did a great deal to give a seventeenth-century stamp of official approval to the unities. “It is necessary to observe unity of action, place, and time; that no one doubts,” says Corneille in the first Discourse (De l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique). Why? Because “A dramatic poem is an imitation, or rather, a portrait of human action; and it is beyond question that portraits are more excellent as they better resemble the original” (trans. Clara W. Crane; in Gilbert, pp. 575, 578). In his Dedicatory Epistle to La Suivante (1634), written much earlier, he says, “I love to follow the rules, but far from being their slave, I enlarge them or narrow them down according to the demands of my subject,” and even “break without scruple” for the sake of beauty (trans. Crane; Gilbert, p. 575). The fascination with space and time as basic dramatic principles no doubt owed something to the fact that intervals of space and time can be defined quantitatively (we can, in Descartes’ terms, have clear and distinct ideas of them). However, a general rule like “unity of place” is vague, and could be made flexible when the playwright found that a narrow interpretation would force him to leave out something necessary for the “unity of action.” Thus Corneille, in his third Discourse, on the Unities, confesses that he succeeded in bringing only three of his plays under the space rule, if rigorously interpreted, but defends himself on a somewhat querulous note:
It is easy for critics to be severe; but if they were to give ten or a dozen plays to the public, they might perhaps slacken the rules more than I do, as soon as they have recognized through experience what constraint their precision brings about and how many beautiful things it banishes from our stage [trans. Elledge and Schier, p. 131].
Few had the temerity to speak out so boldly as Molière did through the mouth of Dorante, in his play The Critique of the School for Wives:
If plays written in accordance with the rules do not please, whereas those which please are not in accordance with the rules, then it necessarily follows that the rules were badly made. Let us therefore disregard this quibbling whereby public taste is restricted, and let us consider in a comedy merely the effect it has upon us [La critique de l’ecole des femmes (1663), vi].
Most of the theorists were united on the a priori approach. “Every art has certain rules which by infallible means lead to the ends proposed,” says George de Scudéry (in his Preface to Ibrahim [1641]; trans. Crane; in Gilbert, p. 580). “I know that there are certain eternal rules, grounded upon good sense, built upon firm and solid reason, that will always last,” says Charles de St.-Évremond (essay on tragedy [1672]; trans. Olga M. Perizweig; in Gilbert, p. 665)—but he adds, “yet there are but few that bear this character.” When faced with an apparent conflict between experience and the rules (as in a dull play that followed the rules, or a moving one that did not), the theorists were apt to argue either that a play that “pleases” must really follow the rules, when they are conveniently reinterpreted, or that no one ought to be pleased by it.
But of course a purely a priori approach to the problem of critical standards was not quite realizable, and the arguments by which even the most rigidly classical critical judgments were supported were bound to contain some empirical premises. As for the major premise, that poetry is an imitation of human action, its logical status was not firmly fixed by most of the rather unphilosophical theorists who took it as basic. The nearest that critical theory could be brought to a Cartesian system is perhaps indicated in some passages of Dryden. For if the formula “poetry is imitation” can be taken as a definition of poetry, and in that sense independent of experience, then some principles of metacriticism, if not of criticism, might actually be demonstrated. In his Defense of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), Dryden reaffirms his definition of a play as “a just and lively image of human nature, &c,” and adds: “for the direct and immediate consequence is this; if Nature is to be imitated, then there is a rule for imitating Nature rightly; otherwise there may be an end, and no means conducing to it” (Essays, ed. Ker, 1926, I, 123; cf. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704, ch. 2). It is clear that Dryden thought it demonstrable that there are some general rules defining standards of criticism; he is quite explicit that “taste” alone, the uncritical response of liking or disliking, cannot be all there is to criticism.
The liking or disliking of the people gives the play the denomination of good or bad, but does not really make or constitute it such. To please the people ought to be the poet’s aim, because plays are made for their delight; but it does not follow that they are always pleased with good plays, or that the plays which please them are always good [ibid., I, 120–21].
Dryden adds—and this is one of the points of his originality—that though it is certain that there are rules, the rules themselves are only probable (I, 123), for in the end they rest upon experience, however analyzed, co-ordinated, and refined. It is in this spirit that Johnson later rejected the unities of space and time—they “arise evidently from false assumptions” about the dramatic experience—though he considered unity of action “essential to the fable” (Preface to Shakespeare).
Another part of this story, which cannot be told here, is of course the celebrated quarrel between the “ancients” and the “moderns,” or rather between their seventeenth century partisans. The widely-held view that the rules of art are best studied in the classical writers, because they provide the greatest models, implied the conclusion that in poetry (and no doubt the other arts, if we knew more about them) progress does not occur, or cannot be counted on. And this conviction, in contrast with the emerging intellectual optimism of the Baconian scientists, who were convinced that human knowledge becomes progressively greater, helped to bring about the separation, now so familiar to our thinking, of the arts from the sciences. Yet, at the same time, the view that the rules do not depend merely on authority (as seemed to have been so often taken for granted in the sixteenth century), but can be rationally justified, when this view combines with the recognition that empirical knowledge will be required for some of the premises of that justification, leads in turn (as we shall see in the following chapter) to the conclusion that a kind of progress can occur in the arts, after all, since not all the possibilities of excellence have been explored.
THEORY OF PAINTING AND MUSIC
Despite La Fontaine’s reminder that “Eyes are not ears,” that “Words and colors are not alike,” the prevailing theory of painting and music in the Enlightenment paralleled closely the theory of poetry. Every applicable principle of Horace and Aristotle was seized upon to make painting a serious and intellectual art, comparable to tragedy and epic, even when liberated from its earlier subservience to a religious end. The function of painting, the theorists held, is (in the Horatian formula) to please by teaching, or to teach by pleasing. Nature is the object, and the painting is an imitation of Nature. As Charles Du Fresnoy says in his De arte graphica (translated into French by Roger de Piles and first published 1668; translated by Dryden, 1695),
The principal and most important part of Painting, is to find out, and thoroughly to understand what Nature has made most Beautiful, and most proper to this Art; and that a Choice of it may be made according to the Taste and Manner of the Ancients [Precept I, trans. Dryden; in E. G. Holt, p. 396].
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, as we saw, the painter had been admonished to imitate Nature, but in a realistic way, with attention to the sensuous show of things. Gradually this view was supplanted by another one, which became dominant in the seventeenth century, and reached its peak of emphasis in the French Academy: what may be called the theory of “ideal imitation,” where “ideal” combines in varying proportions the essential, characteristic, and admirable. (The theory of realistic imitation and of ideal imitation are sometimes found cheek by jowl in the same writer.)
Ideal imitation meant, as it did in literary theory, the representation of the general rather than the individual. A vivid illustration of this concept is provided in the report left to us by Guillet de Saint Georges of the discussion in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, on January 7, 1668, after the lecture by Philippe de Champaigne on Poussin’s painting Rebecca and Eleazer. Champaigne remarked “that it seemed to him that M. Poussin had not handled the subject of the picture with complete truth to history, for he had omitted the camels which the Scripture mentions” (trans. E. G. Holt, p. 391). The reasons given for and against this criticism in the ensuing debate were remarkable in several respects. For example, “the Academy argued . . . whether a painter could remove from the principal subject of his picture the bizarre and embarrassing circumstances with which history or legend had endowed it” (p. 394), and something of a consensus in the affirmative seems to have been reached. “Not what Alcibiades did and suffered,” said Aristotle; no more than the poet need the painter “number the streaks of the tulip.”
The basic ideas of neoclassical theory in the fine arts were set forth in definitive form, with clarity and grace and judicious qualification, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his Discourses on Art (delivered at the English Royal Academy from 1769 to 1790; the first seven published in 1778). In these lectures to students and friends of the Academy (and especially in the third Discourse), Reynolds reflected on the nature and function of painting, and the problems of the painter and the teacher. One of his recurrent themes is the role of reason in art: to what extent can the art of painting be verbally taught; what is the place of rules in the training of the painter and in the judgment of his work? “REASON, without doubt, must ultimately determine every thing; at this minute it is required to inform us when that very reason is to give way to feeling” (XIII; Wark ed., p. 231). If painting is an art at all, it must have principles; but what can be the nature of principles in such a field as this?
Reynolds defines the aim of painting in this way:
THE ART which we profess has beauty for its object; this it is our business to discover and to express; but the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always laboring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting; but which he is yet so far able to communicate, as to raise the thoughts, and extend the views of the spectator [IX, p. 171].
This sounds a little as though Reynolds were poised between the Neoplatonic transcendentalism of the Renaissance and the Romantic view of the tragic artist. But he does not strictly belong to either school, for his main emphasis is on the “just representation of general Nature.” “For perfect beauty in any species must combine all the characters which are beautiful in that species” (III, p. 47): the reason that “sight never beheld” beauty is not that it is so remote; it is just that no actual individual can possess (in the way a painter can make one possess) all the important and characteristic beauties of which its species is capable. So the beauty of a man, or of a child, or of a virgin, is something that the painter must construct, or reconstruct, himself—but from the materials of his observation, including (of course) the works of the ancients (see III, p. 49, and passim).
ALL the objects which are exhibited to our view by nature, upon close examination will be found to have their blemishes and defects. The most beautiful forms have something about them like weakness, minuteness, or imperfection. . . [The painter’s] eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original [III, p. 44].
In this fashion “he, like the philosopher [i.e., the natural philosopher, such as a botanist] will consider nature in the abstract, and represent in every one of his figures the character of its species” (III, p. 50)—he will paint “the general forms of things” (III, p. 52; cf. Johnson, Idler, Nos. 79, 82, written by Reynolds). For example, Bernini is to be reproved because in his statue of David, “he has made him biting his under-lip. This expression is far from general, and still farther from being dignified” (IV, p. 61). And again, the historical painter does not “debase his conceptions with minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery. . . . With him, the cloathing is neither woolen, nor linen, nor silk, sattin, or velvet: it is drapery; it is nothing more” (IV, p. 62). This is almost a parody of Locke’s famous example of an “abstract idea” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, vii, 9).
Reynolds’ discussion of the place of rules in art honestly reflects his awareness of the difficulty of the problem. On the one hand, there must be rules, because there must be general laws that would, if we only knew them, explain the effects of painting. “Every object which pleases must give pleasure upon some certain principles” (III, p. 46); “it cannot be by chance, that excellencies are produced with any constancy or any certainty,” so that “even works of Genius, like every other effect, as they must have their cause, must likewise have their rules” (VI, pp. 97–98). But “GENIUS is supposed to be a power of producing excellencies, which are out of the reach of the rules of art; a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire” (VI, p. 96; cf. Idler, No. 76, written by Reynolds). “Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius” (III, p. 44). How can these ideas be reconciled? Perhaps genius “begins, not where rules, abstractedly taken, end; but where known vulgar and trite rules have no longer any place” (VI, p. 97). And perhaps the real rules are more subtle than is usually thought. “As the objects of pleasure are almost infinite, so their principles vary without end” (III, p. 46). “There are many beauties in our art, that seem, at first, to lie without the reach of precept, and yet may easily be reduced to practical principles” (III, p. 44). But there are no doubt many others that, so to speak, depend on so many variables, or involve such subtle discriminations, that they cannot well be formulated in words. “Unsubstantial, however, as these rules may seem, and difficult as it may be to convey them in writing, they are still seen and felt in the mind of the artist” (VI, p. 98; see also p. 162).
It was not only Descartes’ epistemology that played a decisive role in neoclassical theory of painting. In the early days of French Academicism a certain part of his metaphysics found important application also. If painting, like poetry, is taken as the imitation of human beings in action, historical painting becomes the archetypal genre, and the essential problem of representation is to make the bodily motions that the painter can alone depict express the states of mind and soul that are the real subject of the art. Unlike the poet, the painter cannot say that Achilles is sulking or that Pharaoh’s daughter is delighted by the baby in the bulrushes; he must show these things. This is what is called “expression” in seventeenth-century theory, for example in the leading textbook of Charles Le Brun, co-founder in 1648 of the French Royal Academy: his Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions proposée dans une conference sur l’expression générale et particulière (1698), a synthesis of his very influential teachings over the years. Whatever may be done to formulate principles for the combining of colors, for composition, and for the depiction of objects, the art of painting will not be regularized, that is, rendered subject to rule, unless there is a method of managing expression. This method was found in Descartes’ treatise on the Passions of the Soul (Traité des passions de l’âme, 1649).
The passions of the soul are defined by Descartes as “the perceptions, feelings, or emotions of the soul which we relate specially to it, and which are caused, maintained, and fortified by some movement of the spirits” (I, xxvii; trans. Haldane and Ross, op. cit.). In this treatise he attempted to give systematic definitions, rational analyses, of the emotions—of love, hate, wonder, veneration, cowardice, and so on. And he went on to analyze their physiological manifestations, “How joy causes us to flush” (II, cxv), “How sadness causes paleness” (II, cxvi), “Of tremors” (II, cxviii) and “Of swooning” (II, cxxii). Quintilian, in his Institutes of Oratory (XI, iii), had given examples of external behavior by which the effects are exhibited, and through which they might be depicted, and the seventeenth-century painters read him with care. But Descartes provided a theory of expression: an account of how light coming from the object (the Crucifixion, for example) would strike the sense organs, arousing the ever-restless “animal spirits,” which in turn can activate (1) the emotions of the soul (pity), through the pineal gland, and at the same time (2) the movements of the body that constitute the expression of this emotion (weeping, or paleness, a drawn face, a drooping mouth, a bent head). Thus he allowed a threefold correlation between the external event, the psychological state, and the physical movement or gesture (II, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxviii). But he also explained how there might be a one-many relation, in that the same external cause might excite varying emotions in people of varying sorts—the men standing about the Crucifixion showing, variously, pity, anger, wonder, fear, curiosity (II, xxxix).
The Academicians were often indefatigable in distinguishing and classifying the details of physiological expression for the sake of the fledgling painter:
But behind the categorical exactitude with which they formulated the visible manifestations of these invisible states of the soul lay not only the rational thoroughness of the Cartesian method, but also the central concept of the Cartesian physics that the whole universe and every individual body is a machine, and all movement, in consequence, mechanical. Hence the exhaustively precise nature of Le Brun’s anatomy of the passions which treats the body as a complex instrument that records with mechanical exactitude the invariable effects of emotional stimuli rather than as the vehicle of a humanly significant emotional life.2
It is tempting to draw general lessons from this little chapter in the history of art theory—for example, concerning the effects of too narrow a psychology (for that was the operative part of Descartes’ theory) upon painting. But the cultural and social conditions were somewhat special. And two ideas of some lasting consequence emerged out of even this low ebb of Academicism. First, there was the lively confidence, which even the silliness of extreme expression theory could not make futile, that general principles to explain the goodness and badness of painting might be found. This confidence, we have seen, was still felt by Reynolds. And second, there was the more specific theory (taken over from the Renaissance theorists, but given a new Cartesian justification) about the unity of the dramatic content of the painting itself: the principle of the appropriateness of the gestures to the situation, and the unification of diverse gestures in terms of the central emotional object.
In a sense, a certain degree of rationalism had been, from the time of Pythagoras, at the heart of music theory, because of the known connection between mathematics and consonance. But the practical musicians of late medieval times were not much troubled by these highly abstract considerations, and made their discoveries about melody and harmony on largely empirical grounds. In the Renaissance, partly because of the influence of Neoplatonic ideas, there was a greater attempt to legislate practice on theoretical grounds. Zarlino, for instance, in his Harmonic Institutions of 1558, had made mathematical proportion the basis of his whole theory of composition. His approach was somewhat numerological, since he felt that a priori justifications were required for the use of harmonic relations based on a given proportion—e.g., the minor third, based on 6/5, is acceptable because six is a perfect number, being equal to both the sum and the product of its divisors (1 x 2 x 3). In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when theoretical issues were forced into the open by the daring experiments of actual composers, a new conflict between empirical and rational bases of musical theory emerged.
Music theory during this period was concerned with several problems, including that of consonance and dissonance: which harmonic intervals are permissible in music? Some would obviously reply: do what sounds right. Others were far from satisfied by this simple appeal to experience. Just as Galileo Galilei, in his first investigation into the laws of dynamics, felt that these laws should not only correspond to experience but should also be derivable from self-evident principles—a view that came to be embodied in Descartes’ physics—so music theorists believed that the laws of harmony should be deduced as well as induced. It is interesting to observe some of the positions in this controversy. Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, in his Dialogue Concerning Ancient and Modern Music (1581), was inclined toward empiricism: if the question is raised whether parallel fifths are to be admitted in a particular composition, let the ear be the judge. Descartes, in the letters he wrote to Mersenne, in 1629–30, defended a distinction between (1) mathematical simplicity, or theoretical concordance, and (2) pleasantness of actual sound—and he argued that these might not necessarily coincide. But he thought that the ultimate decision ought to be based on “demonstrations très assurées” (see Oeuvres, I [1897], pp. 227–28).
Leibniz’s few remarks on the subject of harmony, fascinating as they are in themselves, may also reflect an interest in reconciling the parties to this issue, though he did not say enough for us to be sure. Taking advantage of his metaphysical theory that most of each monad’s, or soul’s, perceptions are petites perceptions, below the threshold of consciousness, he suggested, in his essay on “The Principles of Nature and of Grace,” that
even sensuous pleasures are really confusedly known intellectual pleasures. Music charms us, although its beauty only consists in the harmonies of numbers and in the reckoning of the beats or vibrations of sounding bodies, which meet at certain intervals, reckonings of which we are not conscious and which the soul nevertheless does make. The pleasures which sight finds in proportions are of the same nature; and those caused by the other senses amount to almost the same thing, although we may not be able to explain it so distinctly.3
That is, the soul, listening to music, unconsciously counts the beats of the tones, compares their mathematical ratios, and finds them acceptable because the ratios are simple; and what is actually an appreciation of mathematical relationships—a “secret arithmetic [un Arithmétique occulte]”4—appears, on the confused conscious level, as sensuous enjoyment. The aesthetic enjoyment of painting is no doubt explainable in the same way, says Leibniz—and even the pleasure of taste and smell, though the mathematical theory is yet lacking, so that “we may not be able to explain it so distinctly.”
With the help of Descartes’ theory of the emotions, the earlier Renaissance speculations about the emotional effects of music were developed into a full-fledged “Affect Theory” (Affectenlehre) in the seventeenth century. A number of music theorists contributed to this development, which also had an influence upon musical practice. A good example of their thinking is to be found in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) of Johann Mattheson. Basing his approach explicitly upon Descartes, Mattheson undertakes a detailed analysis of the effective resources of music—that is, the capacity of music to arouse specific emotions. The elementary emotions are easy to correlate with music: for example, since joy is an expansion of the vital spirits, “it follows sensibly and naturally that this affect is best expressed by large and expanded intervals” (I, iii, 56; trans. Lenneberg, Jour Mus Theory II, 52). The opposite is true for sadness. Complex emotions are to be analyzed into their constituents, for which musical correlatives are available. Thus:
76. Music, like poetry, occupies itself a great deal with jealousy. Since this state of emotion is a combination of seven passions, namely, mistrust, desire, revenge, sadness, fear, and shame, which go along with the main emotion, burning love, one can easily see why it gives rise to so many kinds of musical invention. All of these, in accordance with nature, must aim at restlessness, vexation, anger, and mournfulness [II, 55].
Mattheson also analyzes the affective character of various musical genres—the minuet, gavotte, bourrée, etc. (II, xiii)—of rhythms (II, vi), and even “musical punctuation” (II, ix). (The specific feelings of keys are treated in an earlier work.)
As in the theory of painting, music theory, in the early eighteenth century, tended to insist on rigorous rules. This may be seen, for example, in the Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) of Johann Joseph Fux, who in the first exercise of the first lesson of Book II points out “that the legislators of any art have ordained nothing needless or not founded on reason” (trans. Alfred Mann, in Strunk, p. 541). But the greatest Cartesian in music theory was undoubtedly Jean-Philippe Rameau, who made the most extensive attempt to apply scientific method to the solution of musical problems, in his Traité de l’harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels (1722). The insistence on reason as the warrant of any acceptable theory is here very strong:
Music is a science which ought to have certain rules; these rules ought to be derived from a self-evident principle; and this principle can scarcely be known to us without the help of mathematics [Preface, trans. Strunk, p. 566].
Experience may be admitted as confirmation and illustration of the principles (see e.g., Book II, ch. 18, Article 1), but “the consequences we derive from it are often false, or leave us at least with a certain doubt that only reason can dispel” (Strunk, p. 565). That doubt seems to be a Cartesian doubt—the kind that can only be dispelled by theorems rigorously deduced from self-evident truths.
TOWARD A UNIFIED AESTHETICS
Though, as we have seen, the Cartesian standards of truth can be extended, mutatis mutandis, over the work of artist and critic, that does not make a complete Cartesian aesthetics. Neither Descartes nor his two great successors, Leibniz and Spinoza, were drawn to aesthetic problems, though they contributed enormously to progress in other branches of philosophy. The implications of Descartes’ philosophy in the field of art (or one possible set of implications) were first worked out by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who coined the term “aesthetics” for a special branch of study, in his Reflections on Poetry (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, 1735). In this work, and in his unfinished Aesthetica (1750, 1758), Baumgarten attempted an aesthetic theory (chiefly of poetry, but extensible to the other arts) based upon Cartesian principles and using the rationalist deductive method, with formal definitions and derivations. The object of logic, he said, is to investigate the kind of perfection proper to thought, in other words to analyze the faculty of knowledge; the object of aesthetics (exactly coordinate with logic) is to investigate the kind of perfection proper to perception, which is a lower level of cognition but autonomous and possessed of its own laws (Reflections, §§ 115–116). Aesthetics is “the science of sensory cognition” (scientia cognitionis sensitivae; Aesthetica, § 1).
From the Cartesian point of view, a science of perception is paradoxical: for perception is just what does not submit to exact and systematic treatment. As we have seen, many philosophers had held that the arts give us some kind of truth, but they did not have Descartes’ idea of truth; they did not judge it by the criteria of clearness and distinctness, of mathematical rigor, which he proposed (Meditations, 1641, Part III). And these criteria make it hard to understand how poetry, for example, can have anything worthy of being called truth, just as they make it hard to understand how we could hope for anything in the way of exact truth about poetry. It was Baumgarten’s purpose to provide this understanding.
Though Descartes’ formula, “clear and distinct ideas,” is often repeated like a single idiom, he actually meant two different things by these terms. In the Principles of Philosophy (1644, Part I, xlv–xlvi), Descartes says, “I term that clear which is present and apparent to an attentive mind. . . But the distinct is that which is so precise and different from all other objects that it contains within itself nothing but what is clear.”5 Thus a sharp pain, though clear, is not distinct, since the feeling itself is confused with the judgment that it has a bodily cause. Leibniz took over these terms, and in his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) gave them an expanded definition:
When I am able to recognize a thing among others, without being able to say in what its differences or characteristics consist, the knowledge is confused. Sometimes indeed we may know clearly, that is without being in the slightest doubt, that a poem or a picture is well or badly done because there is in it an “I know not what” [je ne sais quoi] which satisfies or shocks us. Such knowledge is not yet distinct. It is when I am able to explain the peculiarities which a thing has, that the knowledge is called distinct. Such is the knowledge of an assayer who discerns the true gold from the false by means of certain proofs or marks which make up the definition of gold.6
In short, ideas may be clear or unclear (obscure), and clear ideas may be either distinct or confused. Distinct ideas are abstract thoughts, mathematical and philosophical; confused ideas are sensations: colors, sounds, smells. For they are the blurred blending of our infinite percepts, which at any instant correspond to the percepts of all the infinite other monads in preëstablished harmony with us. Sense perceptions are like the roar of the sea, which is really a mass of little sounds, some of them even below the threshold of hearing.7 Thus, in its own way each sensation has a hidden formal structure, like every other perspective upon the universe, and, as a unification of complex diversity, is like a miniature work of art.
A discourse (oratio), says Baumgarten (§ 1) is “a series of words which designate connected representations” (trans. Aschenbrenner and Holther, p. 37), and a sensate discourse (§§ 3, 4) is a discourse involving representations, or ideas, which are sensuous, i.e., confused. “By perfect sensate discourse we mean discourse whose various parts are directed toward the apprehension of sensate representations” (§ 7; p. 39). “By poem we mean a perfect sensate discourse, by poetics the body of rules to which a poem conforms, by philosophical poetics the science of poetics, by poetry the state of composing a poem, and by poet the man who enjoys that state” (§ 9; p. 39). Finally: “By poetic we shall mean whatever can contribute to the perfection of a poem” (§ 11; p. 40).
Evidently Baumgarten is making the most determined effort thus far made to distinguish between two fundamentally different types of discourse: the clear and distinct, or abstract, discourse of science, and the confused, though more or less clear, discourse of poetry, which exists to render and realize sense experience. We must say “more or less clear,” because this is where the task of poetic theory comes in. Good poetry is clear, but poor poetry is obscure.
In obscure representations there are not contained as many representations of characteristic traits as would suffice for recognizing them and for distinguishing them from others, and as, in fact, are contained in clear representations (by definition). Therefore, more elements will contribute to the communication of sensate representations if these are clear than if they are obscure. A poem, therefore, whose representations are clear is more perfect than one whose representations are obscure, and clear representations are more poetic than obscure ones [§13; p. 41].
Degree of clarity in an idea is “intensive clarity”; Baumgarten also introduces a concept of “extensive clarity”: an idea that contains more ideas within it, so long as they are clear (though confused), is extensively clearer (§ 16). Given these basic principles, he proceeds, with admirable terseness, to show how various lower-order rules, concerning diction, meter, plot, theme, etc., can be derived; they specify the poetic devices that increase extensive clarity, which determines poetic goodness (§ 41).
Baumgarten’s philosophically refined and sophisticated concept of “sensate discourse,” for all the questions that can be raised about it, deserves to be regarded as a forward step toward a fundamental aesthetic theory. It is a technical version of the reigning theory of art as imitation, but a version that takes this theory out of its cruder form. Once poetry and painting came to be widely regarded as “sister arts,” as they were often called in the seventeenth century (see, for example, the opening of Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica), and this conjunction supported by the catch phrase taken out of context from Horace (ut pictura poesis), it was natural enough to inquire whether the principles of both arts could not be derived from the same fundamental principles. Aristotle had called them both “imitations” in his Poetics. The Renaissance theories of musical imitation, still flourishing in the Baroque era, suggested that music is basically the same. Hence there grew up a very widespread attitude, expressed so well and perhaps even unconsciously caricatured in the book by the Abbé Charles Batteux, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1746), where the “single principle” to which all the fine arts are to be “reduced” is the principle that art is the imitation of “beautiful nature.” Batteux included poetry, painting, music, sculpture and dance, and was perhaps the first to define the “beaux arts” as a special category. Parts of his system, much improved, became part of the conceptual scheme underlying the great Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonée des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (1751), as explained by D’Alembert in the Discours préliminaire.
This monistic view of the arts was being questioned, even while it was dominant, and even by those who accepted its basic premise that, in some sense or other, all the arts belong together as imitations. Before a more profound and adequate unifying theory could be achieved, not only the similarities of the arts, but also their differences—the special powers and potentialities of each medium—needed to be explored. For example, the Abbé Jean Baptiste Dubos, a thoroughgoing imitationist, noted, in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719), that painting can imitate an object only at a single moment, while poetry can describe a process. Similar points were made by James Harris, in his Three Treatises, the First Concerning Art, the Second Concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry, the Third Concerning Happiness (1744). Moses Mendelssohn, in Über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schöne Kunste und Wissenschaften (1757), developed a distinction, already suggested by others, between natural and conventional symbols, on which important differences between the visual and the literary arts could depend.
These tendencies of thought reached a kind of consummation in the little book by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766), a book whose clarity and vigor had a profound impact upon later eighteenth-century thinking about the arts. Essentially, Lessing called attention to the distinctiveness of the medium in each art, or, as he put it, the “signs” (Zeichen) it uses for imitation. He did not question that the arts exist to imitate, but he asked, for the first time with such directness and explicitness, what a given art can imitate, and what it can imitate most successfully.8
But I will try to prove my conclusions by starting from first principles.
I argue thus. If it be true that painting employs wholly different signs or means of imitation from poetry,—the one using forms and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time,—and if signs must unquestionably stand in convenient relation with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by side can represent only objects existing side by side, or whose parts so exist, while consecutive signs can express only objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other, in time.
Objects which exist side by side, or whose parts so exist, are called bodies. Consequently bodies with their visible properties are the peculiar subjects of painting.
Objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other in time, are actions. Consequently actions are the peculiar subjects of poetry.
All bodies, however, exist not only in space, but also in time. They continue, and, at any moment of their continuance, may assume a different appearance and stand in different relations. Every one of these momentary appearances and groupings was the result of a preceding, may become the cause of a following, and is therefore the center of a present, action. Consequently painting can imitate actions also, but only as they are suggested through forms.
Actions, on the other hand, cannot exist independently, but must always be joined to certain agents. In so far as those agents are bodies or are regarded as such, poetry describes also bodies, but only indirectly through actions.
Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.
Poetry, in its progressive imitations, can use but a single attribute of bodies, and must choose that one which gives the most vivid picture of the body as exercised in this particular action. . . .
I should place less confidence in this dry chain of conclusions, did I not find them fully confirmed by Homer, or, rather, had they not been first suggested to me by Homer’s method [Laocoon, xvi, trans. Ellen Frothingham, pp. 91–92].
Lessing’s method of argument, and his central principles, are revealed in these paragraphs. He believes painting best equipped to render “beautiful shapes in beautiful attitudes,” and, despite his doctrine of the “pregnant moment,” does not care to have this human beauty, of proportion and harmony, sacrificed to expressiveness—to violent action and emotion, which, after all, poetry can handle better. And if anyone cites (as a counter-example to his view of what is primary in poetry) the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles, so much admired in antiquity and in the Renaissance, Lessing replies with ingenuity and cogency that Homer succeeds by describing, not the finished shield, but the process of creating it, the successive pictures as laid on by the master craftsman (see xviii, p. 114).
Some of Lessing’s specific theories of poetry and painting were found open to objection: he had a limited conception of what painting, especially, should be. But to understand his contribution to aesthetics in a true light, we must, I think, note that he set a new standard of clarity and exactness in aesthetic argument, trying to set forth his premises and his reasoning for all to inspect and discuss. And his work was an open invitation to others to be equally scrupulous and plain in asking precisely what poetry and painting, and music and sculpture, are good for, and how they actually work.
The Laocoon was the only segment of a projected three-part work that Lessing actually finished. But in some of his notes and letters we can see his thought moving one step further in a direction that is of some special interest in view of twentieth-century aesthetic theories. He distinguishes natural signs from conventional or artificial (willkürlichen) signs, and makes this suggestion:
As the power of natural signs consists in their similarity with things, metaphor introduces, instead of such a similarity, which words do not have, another similarity, which the thing referred to has with still another, the concept of which can be renewed more easily and more vividly [trans. René Wellek, History, I, 165].
If a painting signifies in virtue of a similarity between its forms and those of actual objects—if it is, in Charles Peirce’s terms, an “iconic sign”—then the question is whether poetry can be said to contain iconic signs as well. Words, being conventions, have no such capacity. But in metaphor, where one object is made to stand for, or represent, another which it resembles in some way (as the “walking shadow” and “poor player” in Macbeth’s speech might be called iconic signs of life), poetry also becomes a sort of natural sign, or comes close to it. Something like this seems to be Lessing’s theory here; and if it is, we have more than the hint of a system of the arts that would later lift the imitation theory to a new level of significance.
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1 Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule III, in Philosophical Works; trans. Haldane and Ross (Cambridge U., 1911), I, 7.
2 Rennselaer W. Lee, “Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” Art Bulletin XXII (1940): 221–22.
3 “Principles of Nature and of Grace” (1714), §17, trans. George Martin Duncan, The Philosophical Works of Leibniz (New Haven, 1908), pp. 306–7.
4 “Remarks on an Extract from Bayle’s Dictionary” (1703), in C. J. Gerhardt, ed., Philosophischen Schriften, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1880), IV, 550.
5 Trans. Haldane and Ross, Vol. I, p. 237.
6 Discourse on Metaphysics, xxiv, op. cit., p. 43; cf. “Thoughts on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas” (1684). Leibniz’s “je ne sais quoi” became a familiar phrase in the later debates over the nature of taste. Thus, for example, Berkeley, in the third dialogue of Alciphron (1752), where he is attacking Shaftesbury, connects it with the theory of the “moral sense” (Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, 9 vols. [London, 1948–57], III, 120)—he goes on to make Alciphron concede that beauty consists in “symmetry or proportion pleasing to the eye” (III, 123), and argues that it cannot therefore be perceived by sight alone, and “is an object, not of the eye, but of the mind” (III, 124).
7 Discourse, xxxiii. Cf. Leibniz’s Preface to his New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. A. G. Langley (Chicago, 1916), p. 47.
8 An interesting anticipation of Lessing’s position is found in Diderot’s Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets (1751): “I have remarked that each art of imitation had its hieroglyphic, and that it is much to be wished that some informed and discriminating writer would undertake to compare them” (Oeuvres Complètes, 20 vols. [Paris, 1875–77], I, 391; see pp. 385–92 for Diderot’s reply to Batteux, including an interesting comparative analysis of the ways in which the subject of a dying woman might be represented by poet, painter, and composer).