Finally he
reaches concrete beauty, or the individual microcosm, the highest of
all, because the individual idea is superior to the specific, and is
beauty, no longer formal, but of content.
All these degrees of beauty are, as has been said, connected with one
another by means of the ugly, and even in the highest degree, which has
nothing superior to it, the ugly continues its office of beneficent
titillation. The outcome of this ultimate phase is the famous theory of
the Modifications of the Beautiful. None of these modifications can
occur without a struggle, save the sublime and the graceful, which
appear without conflict at the side of supreme beauty. Hartmann gives
four instances: the solution is either immanent, logical,
transcendental, or combined. The idyllic, the melancholy, the sad, the
glad, the elegiac, are instances of the immanent solution; the comic in
all its forms is the logical solution; the tragic is the transcendental
solution; the combined form is found in the humorous, the tragi-comic.
When none of these solutions is possible, we have the ugly; and when an
ugliness of content is expressed by a formal ugliness, we have the
maximum of ugliness, the true aesthetic devil.
Hartmann is the last noteworthy representative of the German
metaphysical school. His works are gigantic in size and appear
formidable. But if one be not afraid of giants and venture to approach
near, one finds nothing but a big Morgante, full of the most commonplace
prejudices, quite easily killed with the bite of a crab!
During this period, Aesthetic had few representatives in other
countries.
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