LITERARY STUDIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 331 



duplicate; or nature being regarded as imperfect, art could but repro- 

 duce the imperfection of actuality. From this misconception Winckel- 

 mann and Lessing had broken away, and Herder, by identifying 

 the Beautiful with the True and the Good, had extended the scope 

 of the artist even when imitating natural beauty. Kant, Goethe, 

 Schiller, and Schelling had carried forward the theory of art as a 

 selective and idealizing process; but it remained for Hegel to lift the 

 discussion altogether out of the realm of the dubious, by demon- 

 strating that art is nature, to be sure, but nature carried to a degree 

 where the object of imitation becomes ideal, the imitator an exponent 

 of the spiritual, and the process creative; the material, therefore, 

 though actual, and consequently limited in possibility, supplements 

 by suggestion that which it fails to express. The one-sidedness of the 

 romantic school, the insufficiency of the principle of Artistic Irony 

 or Caprice, became evident under the flood of light poured upon aes- 

 thetics by Hegel. Round Hegel's theory of art in general, and of its 

 evolution, discussion still centres. And round his Die Poesie most 

 subsequent German writers on poetry, accordant or divergent, revolve. 

 This is true even of such anti-Hegelians as Schopenhauer, who either 

 borrow their ideas from Hegel, or owe their virility to the intensity 

 of their antagonism. 



During this romantic and encyclopedic term, aesthetic criticism 

 passes, then, from the view of art as abstractly objective to that of art 

 as both subjective and objective in its nature; not an incidental or 

 capricious but a necessary exponent of nature and of thought, and an 

 indispensable factor in the history of civilization. The critical method 

 derived from philology has passed from the empirical to the scientific; 

 philology itself is no longer instrumental merely to other disciplines, 

 but independent both in material and discipline. Poetics and literary 

 history have passed from the inspirational to the social and national 

 point of view, and from the magisterial to the dynamic and generic or 

 eidographic method of approach and arrangement. 



3. The third period may be called the Historical-Philosophical: 

 it is characterized by a series of movements corrective of the extremes 

 that had preceded. 



With Jakob Grimm in 1829, philology leaves the void of Aller- 

 leiwissenschajt, and, discovering German grammar, centralizes, then 

 radiates, and last irradiates: becomes, in fact, a comparative science 

 with a definite subject and a well-defined aim. Bopp, likewise, 

 between 1833 and 1852 makes of grammar a comparative science; 

 and is followed by Schleicher in 1862, and others in the comparative 

 study of the Indo-Germanic languages. W. von Humboldt died in 

 1835, but his researches into the influence of language construction 

 upon intellectual development (published 1836-40) add a wonderful 

 significance to this decade of comparative philology. In the history 



