The name is absent

30 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

what that of the æsthetie form?—It was answered, on the
one hand, that art, the essence of art, is all contained in the
content, defined as that which pleases, or as what is moral,
or as what raises man to the heaven of religion or of meta-
physic, or as what is historically correct, or, finally, as what
is naturally and physically beautiful. And, on the other hand,
that the content is indifferent, that it is simply a peg or hook
from which beautiful forms are suspended, which alone be-
atify the æsthetie spirit: unity, harmony, symmetry, and so
on. And on both sides it was attempted to attract the element
that had previously been excluded from the essence of art
as subordinate and secondary: those for the content admit-
ted that it was an advantage to the content (which, accord-
ing to them, was really the constitutive element of the
beautiful) to adorn itself with beautiful forms also, and to
present itself as unity, symmetry, harmony, etc.; and the
formalists, in their turn, admitted that if art did not gam by
the value of its content, its effect did, not a single value, but
the sum of two values being in this case offered. These doc-
trines, which attained their greatest scholastic bulk in Ger-
many with the Hegelians and the Herbartians, is also to be
found more or less everywhere in the history of æsthetie,
ancient, mediaeval, modern, and most modem; and is what
amounts to most in common opinion, for nothing is more
common than to hear that a drama is beautiful in “form,” but
a failure in “content”; that a poem is “most nobly” conceived,
but “executed in ugly verse”; that a painter would have been
greater did he not waste his power as a designer and as a
colourist, upon “small and unworthy themes,” instead of se-
lecting, on the contrary, those of a historical, patriotic, or
sociological character. It may be said that fine taste and true
critical sense of art have to defend themselves at every step
against the perversions of judgment arising from these doc-

<<   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   >>

More intriguing information