4 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



century. Other centuries belonging to the ancient 

 world, or to the transition from the middle ages to 

 modern times, might lay claim to be called the artistic 

 periods of history. The nineteenth century can set up 

 no such claim. Though it has produced an enormous 

 volume of poetry and art, and has certainly excelled in 

 musical composition, it might perhaps rather deserve 

 the name of the inartistic century ; so much has been 

 done, through the growth of industries and by the con- 

 gestion of teeming masses of population, to destroy the 

 natural beauty which was to be found almost everywhere 

 before steam and electricity usurped the leading place 

 as features and agencies of intercourse and civilisation. 

 It may be that the very recognition of this has prompted 

 a large part of the writings and speculations about art, 

 not infrequently with a desire to bring back again what 

 has been lost.-^ 



^ The larger portion of the writ- 

 ings on art will not be dealt with 

 in this chapter, nor in this sec- 

 tion of the ' History of European 

 Thought.' That portion goes usu- 

 ally under the name of Criticism ; 

 to it I referred in the second chapter 

 of this section. In the narrower 

 sense, as cultivated traditionally in 

 France, it owes its diffusion and 

 influence mainly to the growth of 

 periodical literature, and is some- 

 times identified with literary taste. 

 As such, its History has been 

 written by Prof. George Saints- 

 bury, whose ' History of Criticism 

 and Literary Taste in Europe ' (3 

 vols., 1900-1904) seems to be the 

 only comprehensive and complete 

 treatise on the subject. The author 

 marks off his province from that of 

 textual and higher Criticism on the 

 one side, and refuses, on the other, 



to ' ' meddle with the more tran- 

 scendental ^Esthetic, with those 

 ambitious theories of Beauty, and 

 of artistic Pleasure in general, 

 which, fascinating and noble as 

 they appear, have too often proved 

 cloud - Junos " (vol. i. p. 3). He 

 proposes to go to work entirely a 

 posteriori, and " except on the rarest 

 occasions when it may be safe 

 to generalise," confines himself 

 ■'wholly to the particular and tlie 

 actual " (p. 4). So far, therefore, 

 as the nineteenth century is con- 

 cerned, his review of that pei'iod 

 takes no note of what specially in- 

 terests us in the present chapter 

 — viz., the different philosophical 

 theories of the Beautiful. On the 

 other side he deals with many 

 works and authors of which I shall 

 make no mention. This refers pre- 

 eminently to what has been written 



