[Sidenote: _Beauty and the characteristic: Hirt, Meyer, Goethe._]
Many years went by before a similar rebellion arose in Germany; at length in 1797 the art-historian Ludwig Hirt, basing his case on ancient works of art which depicted all things, even things utterly vulgar and ugly, ventured to deny the view that ideal beauty is the principle of art, and that expression has only a secondary place, above which it must not rise for fear of disturbing ideal beauty. For the ideal he substituted the characteristic, as a principle to be applied equally to gods, heroes or animals. Character is "that individuality by which form, movement, signs, physiognomy and expression, local colour, fight, shade and chiaroscuro are distinguished and represented in the manner demanded by the object."[40] Another historian of art, Heinrich Meyer, who started from the position of Winckelmann and went on by adopting a series of compromises, finally asserting an ideal of trees and landscape side by side with the ideal of man and various other animals, tried to find an intermediate position between this doctrine and Hirt's, in the course of controversy with the latter. And Wolfgang von Goethe, forgetful of his youthful days when he chanted the praises of Gothic architecture, returning home from an Italian tour impregnated with Greece and Rome in 1798, also sought a middle term between Beauty and Expression; dwelling on the thought of certain characteristic contents which should supply the artist with forms of beauty to be by him remodelled and developed into complete beauty. The characteristic was thus the mere point of departure, and beauty was simply the result of the artist's elaboration: "we must start from the characteristic" (says he) "in order to attain the beautiful."[41]
[1] _Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe,_ Paris, 1746; see esp. part i. ch. 3; part ii. chs. 4, 5; part iii. ch. 3.
[3] _Analysis of Beauty,_ London, 1753 (Ital. trans., Leghorn, 1761).
[10] _Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,_ 1756 (Ital. trans., Milan, 1804); cf. the preliminary discourse on "Taste."
[11] _Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,_ part iii. § 18.