A History of Aesthetic

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ...being based on the ancient notion that supreme beauty could only be attained by combining the partial beauties of nature.2 He knows that "ideal" forms, i.e. forms modified by the observer's mental activity, need not be beautiful; and he thinks3 that Guido's "ideal" archangel, portrayed, according to the artist's account, after a mental image superior to experience, is much less beautiful than persons whom he has seen in reality, and betrays defective observation of nature. Thus the conception of ideal beauty does not to tend to narrow his doctrine, but to widen it. Now his primary tendency was no doubt to identify this mere beauty of shape, which implies repose simply because motion would involve change of outline, with the beauty or sublimity of the grand style, and we see him arguing with himself in the famous comparison with pure water whether 1 See p. 246 above. 2 iv. 2. 35. s lb. See p. 249 above. CO-ORDINATE TYPES OF BEAUTY. this can really be the case. But looking at the concrete, and arguing back from the phases of more pronounced expression, he sees that this is impossible, and that the grand style is expressive of one state of the soul, if the beautiful style is expressive of others. And indeed, if the grand style is cognate with formal beauty through its simplicity, the beautiful style is so no less through its variety and charm of curvature, so that we get the contradictory but intelligible result which has been mentioned, viz., that true beauty--the beauty of the grand style--falls outside the distinctively beautiful style, while the factor hostile to beauty reaches its maximum in the style of which beauty is the distinctive attribute. Thus he breaks away from the view which would have been the natural...