The Philosophy of the Beautiful (Volume 1); Outlines of the History of Aesthetics (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: reflex process?doubling back on the primitive perception of Nature, and judging critically of Ornament?the earliest theorisings as to Beauty arose. In the poetry, music, and art of each nation and period we have evidence that the general mind of the race has from the first been struggling, as it were, with ideas on the subject of the Beautiful ? ideas which it has never been able fully to grasp, but which it has discerned for a time, then dropped or lost sight of, under the pressure of other interests. These ideas have not been created by the historic evolution of the race. They have been with it from the commencement of its history, although they have sometimes been latent, and although their possessors have been often quite unconscious of them. In those countries and periods, however, in which creative Art has flourished most, the criticism of Art has been most fragmentary and least adequate. The reason is evident. When original insight is present and active in a people, it sweeps criticism before it, as a hindrance or an irrelevancy; but as soon as the flood has spent itself, and the tide begins to ebb, reflection upon the past is natural and inevitable. Men proceed to take stock of their inheritance, and to appraise what they cannot now produce. There were no treatises on the art of Sculpture, for example, written in the age of Pericles; and no criticism of the art of Painting appeared in the Medicean period. It is worthy of remark that the chief artistic periods in history have not been the most notable, morally and politically. An appreciation of the Beautiful has followed, rather than accompanied, the times of greatest national aspiration and success. It has sometimes been their fruit. In the Athenian and Spartan states, so long as political freedom was esteemed ...