326 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



facts; also like Bacon, who is the founder of literary history, this 

 founder of the history of art calls for the genetic method of critical 

 study, by cause and effect, movement, social or other, external 

 influence, relation, change, decay, and revival. He recognizes, too, 

 as Mr. Bosanquet has pointed out, the various phases of express- 

 iveness within the beauty of plastic art, the conflicting claims of 

 beauty and expression, and their partial reconciliation. 



Much that is most practical in the aesthetic theories of Hegel and 

 Schelling, of whom we shall later treat, derives from Winckelmann. 

 What Winckelmann did for the criticism of art during the period of 

 reconstruction, Lessing was doing for German literary criticism. He 

 formulated a system theoretical and historical, and applied it. Even 

 though the first part of Laocoon (1766) was written to contest 

 Winckelmann 's assertion of the spiritual composure of Greek statuary 

 and of the possibility of making the limits of painting as wide as those 

 of poetry, Lessing himself derives to some extent from Winckelmann. 

 But even more than by him, Lessing was influenced on the one hand 

 .by Burke, Hogarth, and Lord Kaimes, on the other by the father of 

 aesthetics himself, Baumgarten. The premises of Lessing 's dramatic 

 theory, as well as those of his aesthetics, may be called into question, 

 but for all that, his Hamburgische Dramaturgic and his Jjoocoon have 

 influenced succeeding criticism more than any works since that time. 



In the year 1764 appeared Kant's first contribution to aesthetics, 

 Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful, not at all 

 influenced by Winckelmann 's past work of the same year, and, of 

 course, not by the Laocoon, which was still on the desk of its 

 writer. Kant, like Lessing, turns here to Burke for his inspiration. 

 :So also in his Critique of Judgment (1790), a work which is epoch- 

 making in the history of poetics. Three streams of theory converge 

 in this critique: the English and German aesthetico-critical, Burke, 

 Kaimes, Reynolds, Hogarth, Baumgarten, Lessing, Winckelmann; 

 the English abstract-sensationalist and individualist, Bacon, 

 Locke, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Hume; and the continental abstract- 

 rationalist, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and the Baron von 

 Wolff. Kant's aesthetic doctrines were made concrete and popularized 

 by Schiller, especially those of the aesthetic semblance, and the rela- 

 tive effects of sublimity and beauty upon the beholder. Bearing the 

 impress of Schiller and Goethe (who also adapted and modified 

 Kant), the Kantian aesthetic has passed not only into popular 

 poetic theory, but into the dialectic of Schelling and Hegel. 



Space prohibits more than a passing mention of the sources of 

 Goethe and Schiller. While the first of these in no place systematically 

 develops a theory of poetry, the genesis of his theory and the course 

 of his opinions are not difficult to discover. His aesthetic descent is 

 not, as Mr. Bosanquet thinks, from Lessing, Winckelmann, and Kant, 



