Steinthal never realized that to speak is to speak well or beautifully, under penalty of _not_ speaking, and that the revolution which he and Humboldt had effected in the conception of language must inevitably react upon and transform Poetic, Rhetoric, and Aesthetic.
Thus, despite so many efforts of conscientious analysis on the part of Humboldt and of Steinthal, the unity of language and of poetry, and the identification of the science of language and the science of poetry still found its least imperfect expression in the prophetic aphorisms of Vico.
The philosophical movement in Germany from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth, notwithstanding its many errors, is yet so notable and so imposing with the philosophers already considered, as to merit the first place in the European thought of that period. This is even more the case as regards Aesthetic than as regards philosophy in general.
France was the prey of Condillac's sensualism, and therefore incapable of duly appreciating the spiritual activity of art. We hardly get a glimpse of Winckelmann's transcendental spiritualism in Quatremère de Quincy, and the frigid academics of Victor Cousin were easily surpassed by Theodore Jouffroy, though he too failed of isolating the aesthetic fact. French Romanticism defined literature as "the expression of society," admired under German influence the grotesque and the characteristic, declared the independence of art in the formula of "art for art's sake," but did not succeed in surpassing philosophically the old doctrine of the "imitation of nature." F. Schlegel and Solger indeed were largely responsible for the Romantic movement in France--Schlegel with his belief in the characteristic or _interesting_ as the principle of modern art, which led him to admire the cruel and the ugly; Solger with his dialectic arrangement, whereby the finite or terrestrial element is absorbed and annihilated in the divine and thus becomes the tragic, or _vice versa_, and the result is the comic. Rosenkranz published in Königsberg an Aesthetic of the Ugly, and the works of Vischer and Zeising abound in subtleties relating to the Idea and to its expression in the beautiful and sublime. These writers conceived of the Idea as the Knight Purebeautiful, constrained to abandon his tranquil ease through the machinations of the Ugly; the Ugly leads him into all sorts of disagreeable adventures, from all of which he eventually emerges victorious. The Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous, and so on, are his Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena. Another version of their knight's adventures might be described as his conquest by his enemies, but at the moment of conquest he transforms and irradiates his conquerors. To such a mediocre and artificial mythology led the much-elaborated theory of the Modifications of the Beautiful.