A THEORY OF ART.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

THERE are three ways in which ideas preëminently manifest themselves as living powers in the practical life of mankind, namely: in Art, in Ethics, and in Religion. To the province of Art belong, generally, those productions of the imagination which are capable of calling forth the sentiment or emotion of the beautiful; to that of Ethics, the striving of the individual will after worth and dignity of character, of communities of men after the right organization of society, and of a state after its true constitution; and to that of Religion, the striving after the restoration of that fellowship with God and harmony with nature which alone can place man in the position he was originally destined to occupy. In all these ways, ideas, either æsthetical, moral, or spiritual, become to some extent, though most often, it must be confessed, very feebly and imperfectly realized. The first of these ways for the realization of ideas, and

also the lowest, since it can never rise higher than to the completeness of being on the side of its form, is the subject I propose to treat of in the following pages. The general subject, therefore, is Art; not, however, in the restricted and limited sense in which this word is very commonly understood. The Art which I wish to consider embraces whatever works-whether they be the works of Nature, or of man; and whether of the common man, or of the man of genius-excite the imagination to that peculiar kind of activity which is the necessary condition of our perception of the beautiful. For in a certain sense, each individual for himself, in the very perception of beauty, may be said to create it. Our imagination, in exact proportion to our sense of a beautiful work, copies that of the original producer. Each man plays the part of an artist for himself. He does over again what is already done to his hands, and reproduces the embodied idea. He forms for himself those "intellectual images," as by Bishop Butler they are not inaptly called,1 which cause the pleasurable emotions he very naturally, though not altogether correctly, supposes to arise from the merely passive susceptibility of his nature; for in this whole order of perceptions

1 Ser. 14.

"We receive but what we give, And in our life alone, does nature live." 2

2 "Dejection. An Ode." Coleridge's Poems.

It is first when we are made clearly aware of the function and agency of the imagination, as vitally concerned in the excitement of that emotion which the beautiful in Nature and Art produces upon us, that the possibility of a true theory of Art begins to dawn upon the mind. For if in Ethics the will may be free, at the same time that it is subject to law, and can be truly free only so far as it freely conforms to its true law, the great point in that science, so too the imagination may be free in its subjection to law, and can have, indeed, the true freedom which Art requires, only so far as it freely or spontaneously enters into the law which should govern its operations in each specific case of production. And as the felt sentiment of approbation or of disapprobation is the form in which the judgment as to whether the will is acting in obedience to its true law or not, expresses itself to our immediate experience, in the moral sphere; so the felt sentiment of complacency or disgust, of delight or aversion, is the immediate judgment which we are constrained to pass upon the conduct of the imagination. In both cases, this instantaneous judgment in the form of an approving or condemnatory feeling is the à posteriori empirical element, which should never be disregarded or thought lightly of, whether in morals or in art, while the will and the imagination, acting independently of our whims and caprices, and in free conformity with that rea

son which is their true law and basis, are the à priori element and principle, never to be lost sight of in a philosophical system of Morals or of Art.

To drop the subject of Morals, which I have introduced here only for the sake of the analogy, and to revert wholly to that of Art; if the question were put, which one of the two elements just mentioned — which may be distinguished as the active and the passive elements in Art—is the most important, we cannot doubt that that is the most important one upon which the other is wholly dependent; and as the passive feeling stands in the relation of dependence on the intellectual activity, the latter is more important, and more carefully to be considered, watched over and cultivated than the former, which necessarily follows its lead. If this feeling, divorced from the imagination, is that which is really meant by the modern word Taste, a term which seems to have been first introduced by the French, and was certainly unknown to the ancients, if this merely passive, æsthetical faculty of judgment, so liable to be warped in a hundred ways, and to become altogether conventional, should be made the supreme arbiter over the imagination, it is difficult to see how genuine Art could long survive such a change in the true order of things, what could save it from losing all its vitality, and degenerating into absolute tameness or something worse.

I may here bring in a few words on this point