Thus we require of man a speaking expression as soon as he becomes
conscious of his moral destiny; but we desire at the same time that this
expression speak to his advantage, that is to say, it marks in him
sentiments conformable to his moral destiny, and a superior moral
aptitude. This is what reason requires in the human face.

But, on the other side, man, as far as he is a phenomenon, is an object
of sense; there, where the moral sentiment is satisfied, the aesthetic
sentiment does not understand its being made a sacrifice, and the
conformity with an idea ought not to lessen the beauty of the phenomenon.
Thus, as much as reason requires an expression of the morality of the
subject in the human face, so much, and with no less rigor, does the eye
demand beauty. As these two requirements, although coming from the
principles of the appreciation of different degrees, address themselves
to the same object, also both one and the other must be given
satisfaction by one and the same cause. The disposition of the soul
which places man in the best state for accomplishing his moral destiny
ought to give place to an expression that will be at the same time the
most advantageous to his beauty as phenomenon; in other terms, his moral
exercise ought to be revealed by grace.

But a great difficulty now presents itself from the idea alone of the
expressive movements which bear witness to the morality of the subject:
it appears that the cause of these movements is necessarily a moral
cause, a principle which resides beyond the world of sense; and from the
sole idea of beauty it is not less evident that its principle is purely
sensuous, and that it ought to be a simple effect of nature, or at the
least appear to be such. But if the ultimate reason of the movements
which offer a moral expression is necessarily without, and the ultimate
reason of the beautiful necessarily within, the sensuous world, it
appears that grace, which ought to unite both of them, contains a
manifest contradiction.

To avoid this contradiction we must admit that the moral cause, which in
our soul is the foundation of grace, brings, in a necessary manner, in
the sensibility which depends on that cause, precisely that state which
contains in itself the natural conditions of beauty. I will explain.
The beautiful, as each sensuous phenomenon, supposes certain conditions,
and, in as far as it is beautiful, these are purely conditions of the
senses; well, then, in that the mind (in virtue of a law that we cannot
fathom), from the state in which it is, itself prescribes to physical
nature which accompanies it, its own state, and in that the state of
moral perfection is precisely in it the most favorable for the
accomplishment of the physical conditions of beauty, it follows that it
is the mind which renders beauty possible; and there its action ends.
But whether real beauty comes forth from it, that depends upon the
physical conditions alluded to, and is consequently a free effect of
nature. Therefore, as it cannot be said that nature is properly free in
the voluntary movements, in which it is employed but as a means to attain
an end, and as, on the other side, it cannot be said that it is free in
its involuntary movements, which express the moral, the liberty with
which it manifests itself, dependent as it is on the will of the subject,
must be a concession that the mind makes to nature; and, consequently, it
can be said that grace is a favor in which the moral has desired to
gratify the sensuous element; the same as the architectonic beauty may be
considered as nature acquiescing to the technical form.

May I be permitted a comparison to clear up this point? Let us suppose a
monarchical state administered in such a way that, although all goes on
according to the will of one person, each citizen could persuade himself
that he governs and obeys only his own inclination, we should call that
government a liberal government.

But we should look twice before we should thus qualify a government in
which the chief makes his will outweigh the wishes of the citizens, or a
government in which the will of the citizens outweighs that of the chief.
In the first case, the government would be no more liberal; in the
second, it would not be a government at all.

It is not difficult to make application of these examples to what the
human face could be under the government of the mind. If the mind is
manifested in such a way through the sensuous nature subject to its
empire that it executes its behests with the most faithful exactitude, or
expresses its sentiments in the most perfectly speaking manner, without
going in the least against that which the aesthetic sense demands from it
as a phenomenon, then we shall see produced that which we call grace.
But this is far from being grace, if mind is manifested in a constrained
manner by the sensuous nature, or if sensuous nature acting alone in all
liberty the expression of moral nature was absent. In the first case
there would not be beauty; in the second the beauty would be devoid of
play.

The super-sensuous cause, therefore, the cause of which the principle is
in the soul, can alone render grace speaking, and it is the purely
sensuous cause having its principle in nature which alone can render it
beautiful. We are not more authorized in asserting that mind engenders
beauty than we should be, in the former example, in maintaining that the
chief of the state produces liberty; because we can indeed leave a man in
his liberty, but not give it to him.

But just as when a people feels itself free under the constraint of a
foreign will, it is in a great degree due to the sentiments animating the
prince; and as this liberty would run great risks if the prince took
opposite sentiments, so also it is in the moral dispositions of the mind
which suggests them that we must seek the beauty of free movements. And
now the question which is presented is this one: What then are the
conditions of personal morality which assure the utmost amount of liberty
to the sensuous instruments of the will? and what are the moral
sentiments which agree the best in their expression with the beautiful?

That which is evident is that neither the will, in the intentional
movement, nor the passion, in the sympathetic movement, ought to act as a
force with regard to the physical nature which is subject to it, in order
that this, in obeying it, may have beauty. In truth, without going
further, common sense considers ease to be the first requisite of grace.
It is not less evident that, on another side, nature ought not to act as
a force with regard to mind, in order to give occasion for a fine moral
expression; for there, where physical nature commands alone, it is
absolutely necessary that the character of the man should vanish.

We can conceive three sorts of relation of man with himself: I mean the
sensuous part of man with the reasonable part. From these three
relations we have to seek which is that one which best suits him in the
sensuous world, and the expression of which constitutes the beautiful.
Either man enforces silence upon the exigencies of his sensuous nature,
to govern himself conformably with the superior exigencies of his
reasonable nature; or else, on the contrary, he subjects the reasonable
portion of his being to the sensuous part, reducing himself thus to obey
only the impulses which the necessity of nature imprints upon him, as
well as upon the other phenomena; or lastly, harmony is established
between the impulsions of the one and the laws of the other, and man is
in perfect accord with himself.

If he has the consciousness of his spiritual person, of his pure
autonomy, man rejects all that is sensuous, and it is only when thus
isolated from matter that he feels to the full his moral liberty. But
for that, as his sensuous nature opposes an obstinate and vigorous
resistance to him, he must, on his side, exercise upon it a notable
pressure and a strong effort, without which he could neither put aside
the appetites nor reduce to silence the energetic voice of instinct. A
mind of this quality makes the physical nature which depends on him feel
that it has a master in him, whether it fulfils the orders of the will or
endeavors to anticipate them. Under its stern discipline sensuousness
appears then repressed, and interior resistance will betray itself
exteriorly by the constraint. This moral state cannot, then, be
favorable to beauty, because nature cannot produce the beautiful but as
far as it is free, and consequently that which betrays to us the
struggles of moral liberty against matter cannot either be grace.

If, on the contrary, subdued by its wants, man allows himself to be
governed without reserve by the instinct of nature, it is his interior
autonomy that vanishes, and with it all trace of this autonomy is
exteriorly effaced. The animal nature is alone visible upon his visage;
the eye is watery and languishing, the mouth rapaciously open, the voice
trembling and muffled, the breathing short and rapid, the limbs trembling
with nervous agitation: the whole body by its languor betrays its moral
degradation. Moral force has renounced all resistance, and physical
nature, with such a man, is placed in full liberty. But precisely this
complete abandonment of moral independence, which occurs ordinarily at
the moment of sensuous desire, and more still at the moment of enjoyment,
sets suddenly brute matter at liberty which until then had been kept in
equilibrium by the active and passive forces. The inert forces of nature
commence from thence to gain the upper hand over the living forces of the
organism; the form is oppressed by matter, humanity by common nature.
The eye, in which the soul shone forth, becomes dull, or it protrudes
from its socket with I know not what glassy haggardness; the delicate
pink of the cheeks thickens, and spreads as a coarse pigment in uniform
layers. The mouth is no longer anything but a simple opening, because
its form no longer depends upon the action of forces, but on their
non-resistance; the gasping voice and breathing are no more than an
effort to ease the laborious and oppressed lungs, and which show a simple
mechanical want, with nothing that reveals a soul. In a word, in that
state of liberty which physical nature arrogates to itself from its
chief, we must not think of beauty. Under the empire of the moral agent,
the liberty of form was only restrained, here it is crushed by brutal
matter, which gains as much ground as is abstracted from the will. Man
in this state not only revolts the moral sense, which incessantly claims
of the face an expression of human dignity, but the aesthetic sense,
which is not content with simple matter, and which finds in the form an
unfettered pleasure--the aesthetic sense will turn away with disgust from
such a spectacle, where concupiscence could alone find its gratification.

Of these two relations between the moral nature of man and his physical
nature, the first makes us think of a monarchy, where strict surveillance
of the prince holds in hand all free movement; the second is an
ochlocracy, where the citizen, in refusing to obey his legitimate
sovereign, finds he has liberty quite as little as the human face has
beauty when the moral autonomy is oppressed; nay, on the contrary, just
as the citizens are given over to the brutal despotism of the lowest
classes, so the form is given over here to the despotism of matter. Just
as liberty finds itself between the two extremes of legal oppression and
anarchy, so also we shall find the beautiful between two extremes,
between the expression of dignity which bears witness to the domination
exercised by the mind, and the voluptuous expression which reveals the
domination exercised by instinct.

In other terms, if the beauty of expression is incompatible with the
absolute government of reason over sensuous nature, and with the
government of sensuous nature over the reason, it follows that the third
state (for one could not conceive a fourth)--that in which the reason and
the senses, duty and inclination, are in harmony--will be that in which
the beauty of play is produced. In order that obedience to reason may
become an object of inclination, it must represent for us the principle
of pleasure; for pleasure and pain are the only springs which set the
instincts in motion. It is true that in life it is the reverse that
takes place, and pleasure is ordinarily the motive for which we act
according to reason. If morality itself has at last ceased to hold this
language, it is to the immortal author of the "Critique" to whom we must
offer our thanks; it is to him to whom the glory is due of having
restored the healthy reason in separating it from all systems. But in
the manner in which the principles of this philosopher are ordinarily
expressed by himself and also by others, it appears that the inclination
can never be for the moral sense otherwise than a very suspicious
companion, and pleasure a dangerous auxiliary for moral determinations.
In admitting that the instinct of happiness does not exercise a blind
domination over man, it does not the less desire to interfere in the
moral actions which depend on free arbitration, and by that it changes
the pure action of the will, which ought always to obey the law alone,
never the instinct. Thus, to be altogether sure that the inclination has
not interfered with the demonstrations of the will, we prefer to see it
in opposition rather than in accord with the law of reason; because it
may happen too easily, when the inclination speaks in favor of duty, that
duty draws from the recommendation all its credit over the will. And in
fact, as in practical morals, it is not the conformity of the acts with
the law, but only the conformity of the sentiments with duty, which is
important. We do not attach, and with reason, any value to this
consideration, that it is ordinarily more favorable to the conformity of
acts with the law that inclination is on the side of duty. As a
consequence, this much appears evident: that the assent of sense, if it
does not render suspicious the conformity of the will with duty, at least
does not guarantee it. Thus the sensuous expression of this assent,
expression that grace offers to us, could never bear a sufficient
available witness to the morality of the act in which it is met; and it
is not from that which an action or a sentiment manifests to the eyes by
graceful expression that we must judge of the moral merit of that
sentiment or of that action.

Up to the present time I believe I have been in perfect accord with the
rigorists in morals. I shall not become, I hope, a relaxed moralist in
endeavoring to maintain in the world of phenomena and in the real
fulfilment of the law of duty those rights of sensuous nature which, upon
the ground of pure reason and in the jurisdiction of the moral law, are
completely set aside and excluded.

I will explain. Convinced as I am, and precisely because I am convinced,
that the inclination in associating itself to an act of the will offers
no witness to the pure conformity of this act with the duty, I believe
that we are able to infer from this that the moral perfection of man
cannot shine forth except from this very association of his inclination
with his moral conduct. In fact, the destiny of man is not to accomplish
isolated moral acts, but to be a moral being. That which is prescribed
to him does not consist of virtues, but of virtue, and virtue is not
anything else "than an inclination for duty." Whatever, then, in the
objective sense, may be the opposition which separates the acts suggested
by the inclination from those which duty determines, we cannot say it is
the same in the subjective sense; and not only is it permitted to man to
accord duty with pleasure, but he ought to establish between them this
accord, he ought to obey his reason with a sentiment of joy. It is not
to throw it off as a burden, nor to cast it off as a too coarse skin.
No, it is to unite it, by a union the most intimate, with his Ego, with
the most noble part of his being, that a sensuous nature has been
associated in him to his purely spiritual nature. By the fact that
nature has made of him a being both at once reasonable and sensuous, that
is to say, a man, it has prescribed to him the obligation not to separate
that which she has united; not to sacrifice in him the sensuous being,
were it in the most pure manifestations of the divine part; and never to
found the triumph of one over the oppression and the ruin of the other.
It is only when he gathers, so to speak, his entire humanity together,
and his way of thinking in morals becomes the result of the united action
of the two principles, when morality has become to him a second nature,
it is then only that it is secure; for, as far as the mind and the duty
are obliged to employ violence, it is necessary that the instinct shall
have force to resist them. The enemy which only is overturned can rise
up again, but the enemy reconciled is truly vanquished. In the moral
philosophy of Kant the idea of duty is proposed with a harshness enough
to ruffle the Graces, and one which could easily tempt a feeble mind to
seek for moral perfection in the sombre paths of an ascetic and monastic
life. Whatever precautions the great philosopher has been able to take
in order to shelter himself against this false interpretation, which must
be repugnant more than all else to the serenity of the free mind, he has
lent it a strong impulse, it seems to me, in opposing to each other by a
harsh contrast the two principles which act upon the human will. Perhaps
it was hardly possible, from the point of view in which he was placed, to
avoid this mistake; but he has exposed himself seriously to it. Upon the
basis of the question there is no longer, after the demonstration he has
given, any discussion possible, at least for the heads which think and
which are quite willing to be persuaded; and I am not at all sure if it
would not be better to renounce at once all the attributes of the human
being than to be willing to reach on this point, by reason, a different
result. But although he began to work without any prejudice when he
searched for the truth, and though all is here explained by purely
objective reasons, it appears that when he put forward the truth once
found he had been guided by a more subjective maxim, which is not
difficult, I believe, to be accounted for by the time and circumstances.

What, in fact, was the moral of his time, either in theory or in its
application? On one side, a gross materialism, of which the shameless
maxims would revolt his soul; impure resting-places offered to the
bastard characters of a century by the unworthy complacency of
philosophers; on the other side, a pretended system of perfectibility,
not less suspicious, which, to realize the chimera of a general
perfection common to the whole universe, would not be embarrassed for a
choice of means. This is what would meet his attention. So he carried
there, where the most pressing danger lay and reform was the most urgent,
the strongest forces of his principles, and made it a law to pursue
sensualism without pity, whether it walks with a bold face, impudently
insulting morality, or dissimulates under the imposing veil of a moral,
praiseworthy end, under which a certain fanatical kind of order know how
to disguise it. He had not to disguise ignorance, but to reform
perversion; for such a cure a violent blow, and not persuasion or
flattery, was necessary; and the more the contrast would be violent
between the true principles and the dominant maxims, the more he would
hope to provoke reflection upon this point. He was the Draco of his
time, because his time seemed to him as yet unworthy to possess a Solon,
neither capable of receiving him. From the sanctuary of pure reason he
drew forth the moral law, unknown then, and yet, in another way, so
known; he made it appear in all its saintliness before a degraded
century, and troubled himself little to know whether there were eyes too
enfeebled to bear the brightness.

But what had the children of the house done for him to have occupied
himself only with the valets? Because strongly impure inclinations often
usurp the name of virtue, was it a reason for disinterested inclinations
in the noblest heart to be also rendered suspicious? Because the moral
epicurean had willingly relaxed the law of reason, in order to fit it as
a plaything to his customs, was it a reason to thus exaggerate harshness,
and to make the fulfilment of duty, which is the most powerful
manifestation of moral freedom, another kind of decorated servitude of a
more specious name? And, in fact, between the esteem and the contempt of
himself has the truly moral man a more free choice than the slave of
sense between pleasure and pain? Is there less of constraint there for a
pure will than here for a depraved will? Must one, by this imperative
form given to the moral law, accuse man and humble him, and make of this
law, which is the most sublime witness of our grandeur, the most crushing
argument for our fragility? Was it possible with this imperative force
to avoid that a prescription which man imposes on himself, as a
reasonable being, and which is obligatory only for him on that account,
and which is conciliatory with the sentiment of his liberty only--that
this prescription, say I, took the appearance of a foreign law, a
positive law, an appearance which could hardly lessen the radical
tendency which we impute to man to react against the law?

It is certainly not an advantage for moral truth to have against itself
sentiments which man can avow without shame. Thus, how can the sentiment
of the beautiful, the sentiment of liberty, accord with the austere mind
of a legislation which governs man rather through fear than trust, which
tends constantly to separate that which nature has united, and which is
reduced to hold us in defiance against a part of our being, to assure its
empire over the rest? Human nature forms a whole more united in reality
than it is permitted to the philosopher, who can only analyze, to allow
it to appear. The reason can never reject as unworthy of it the
affections which the heart recognizes with joy; and there, where man
would be morally fallen, he can hardly rise in his own esteem. If in the
moral order the sensuous nature were only the oppressed party and not an
ally, how could it associate with all the ardor of its sentiments in a
triumph which would be celebrated only over itself? how could it be so
keen a participator in the satisfaction of a pure spirit having
consciousness of itself, if in the end it could not attach itself to the
pure spirit with such closeness that it is not possible even to
intellectual analysis to separate it without violence.

The will, besides, is in more immediate relation with the faculty of
feeling than with the cognitive faculties, and it would be regrettable in
many circumstances if it were obliged, in order to guide itself, to take
advice of pure reason. I prejudge nothing good of a man who dares so
little trust to the voice of instinct that he is obliged each time to
make it appear first before the moral law; he is much more estimable who
abandons himself with a certain security to inclination, without having
to fear being led astray by her. That proves in fact that with him the
two principles are already in harmony--in that harmony which places a
seat upon the perfection of the human being, and which constitutes that
which we understand by a noble soul.

It is said of a man that he has a great soul when the moral sense has
finished assuring itself of all the affections, to the extent of
abandoning without fear the direction of the senses to the will, and
never incurring the risk of finding himself in discord with its
decisions. It follows that in a noble soul it is not this or that
particular action, it is the entire character which is moral. Thus we
can make a merit of none of its actions because the satisfaction of an
instinct could not be meritorious. A noble soul has no other merit than
to be a noble soul. With as great a facility as if the instinct alone
were acting, it accomplishes the most painful duties of humanity, and the
most heroic sacrifice that she obtains over the instinct of nature seems
the effect of the free action of the instinct itself. Also, it has no
idea of the beauty of its act, and it never occurs to it that any other
way of acting could be possible; on the contrary, the moralist formed by
the school and by rule, is always ready at the first question of the
master to give an account with the most rigorous precision of the
conformity of its acts with the moral law. The life of this one is like
a drawing where the pencil has indicated by harsh and stiff lines all
that the rule demands, and which could, if necessary, serve for a student
to learn the elements of art. The life of a noble soul, on the contrary,
is like a painting of Titian; all the harsh outlines are effaced, which
does not prevent the whole face being more true, lifelike and harmonious.

It is then in a noble soul that is found the true harmony between reason
and sense, between inclination and duty, and grace is the expression of
this harmony in the sensuous world. It is only in the service of a noble
soul that nature can at the same time be in possession of its liberty,
and preserve from all alteration the beauty of its forms; for the one,
its liberty would be compromised under the tyranny of an austere soul,
the other, under the anarchical regimen of sensuousness. A noble soul
spreads even over a face in which the architectonic beauty is wanting an
irresistible grace, and often even triumphs over the natural disfavor.
All the movements which proceed from a noble soul are easy, sweet, and
yet animated. The eye beams with serenity as with liberty, and with the
brightness of sentiment; gentleness of heart would naturally give to the
mouth a grace that no affectation, no art, could attain. You trace there
no effort in the varied play of the physiognomy, no constraint in the
voluntary movements--a noble soul knows not constraint; the voice becomes
music, and the limpid stream of its modulations touches the heart. The
beauty of structure can excite pleasure, admiration, astonishment; grace
alone can charm. Beauty has its adorers; grace alone has its lovers: for
we pay our homage to the Creator, and we love man. As a whole, grace
would be met with especially amongst women; beauty, on the contrary, is
met with more frequently in man, and we need not go far without finding
the reason. For grace we require the union of bodily structure, as well
as that of character: the body, by its suppleness, by its promptitude to
receive impressions and to bring them into action; the character, by the
moral harmony of the sentiments. Upon these two points nature has been
more favorable to the woman than to man.

The more delicate structure of the woman receives more rapidly each
impression and allows it to escape as rapidly. It requires a storm to
shake a strong constitution, and when vigorous muscles begin to move we
should not find the ease which is one of the conditions of grace. That
which upon the face of woman is still a beautiful sensation would express
suffering already upon the face of man. Woman has the more tender
nerves; it is a reed which bends under the gentlest breath of passion.
The soul glides in soft and amiable ripples upon her expressive face,
which soon regains the calm and smooth surface of the mirror.

The same also for the character: for that necessary union of the soul
with grace the woman is more happily gifted than man. The character of
woman rises rarely to the supreme ideal of moral purity, and would rarely
go beyond acts of affection; her character would often resist
sensuousness with heroic force. Precisely because the moral nature of
woman is generally on the side of inclination, the effect becomes the
same, in that which touches the sensuous expression of this moral state,
as if the inclination were on the side of duty. Thus grace would be the
expression of feminine virtue, and this expression would often be wanting
in manly virtue.




ON DIGNITY.


As grace is the expression of a noble soul, so is dignity the expression
of elevated feeling.

It has been prescribed to man, it is true, to establish between his two
natures a unison, to form always an harmonious whole, and to act as in
union with his entire humanity. But this beauty of character, this last
fruit of human maturity, is but an ideal to which he ought to force his
conformity with a constant vigilance, but to which, with all his efforts,
he can never attain.

He cannot attain to it because his nature is thus made and it will not
change; the physical conditions of his existence themselves are opposed
to it.

In fact, his existence, so far as he is a sensuous creature, depends on
certain physical conditions; and in order to insure this existence man
ought--because, in his quality of a free being, capable of determining
his modifications by his own will--to watch over his own preservation
himself. Man ought to be made capable of certain acts in order to fulfil
these physical conditions of his existence, and when these conditions are
out of order to re-establish them.

But although nature had to give up to him this care which she reserves
exclusively to herself in those creatures which have only a vegetative
life, still it was necessary that the satisfaction of so essential a
want, in which even the existence of the individual and of the species is
interested, should not be absolutely left to the discretion of man, and
his doubtful foresight. It has then provided for this interest, which in
the foundation concerns it, and it has also interfered with regard to the
form in placing in the determination of free arbitration a principle of
necessity. From that arises natural instinct, which is nothing else than
a principle of physical necessity which acts upon free arbitration by the
means of sensation.

The natural instinct solicits the sensuous faculty through the combined
force of pain and of pleasure: by pain when it asks satisfaction, and by
pleasure when it has found what it asks.

As there is no bargaining possible with physical necessity, man must
also, in spite of his liberty, feel what nature desires him to feel.
According as it awakens in him a painful or an agreeable sensation, there
will infallibly result in him either aversion or desire. Upon this point
man quite resembles the brute; and the stoic, whatever his power of soul,
is not less sensible of hunger, and has no less aversion to it, than the
worm that crawls at his feet.

But here begins the great difference: with the lower creature action
succeeds to desire or aversion quite as of necessity, as the desire to
the sensation, and the expression to the external impression. It is here
a perpetual circle, a chain, the links of which necessarily join one to
the other. With man there is one more force--the will, which, as a
super-sensuous faculty, is not so subject to the law of nature, nor that
of reason, that he remains without freedom to choose, and to guide
himself according to this or to that. The animal cannot do otherwise
than seek to free itself from pain; man can decide to suffer.

The will of man is a privilege, a sublime idea, even when we do not
consider the moral use that he can make of it. But firstly, the animal
nature must be in abeyance before approaching the other, and from that
cause it is always a considerable step towards reaching the moral
emancipation of the will to have conquered in us the necessity of nature,
even in indifferent things, by the exercise in us of the simple will.

The jurisdiction of nature extends as far as the will, but there it
stops, and the empire of reason commences. Placed between these two
jurisdictions, the will is absolutely free to receive the law from one
and the other; but it is not in the same relation with one and the other.
Inasmuch as it is a natural force it is equally free with regard to
nature and with respect to reason; I mean to say it is not forced to pass
either on the side of one or of the other: but as far as it is a moral
faculty it is not free; I mean that it ought to choose the law of reason.
It is not chained to one or the other, but it is obliged towards the law
of reason. The will really then makes use of its liberty even whilst it
acts contrary to reason: but it makes use of it unworthily, because,
notwithstanding its liberty, it is no less under the jurisdiction of
nature, and adds no real action to the operation of pure instinct; for to
will by virtue of desire is only to desire in a different way.

There may be conflict between the law of nature, which works in us
through the instinct, and the law of reason, which comes out of
principles, when the instinct, to satisfy itself, demands of us an action
which disgusts our moral sense. It is, then, the duty of the will to
make the exigencies of the instinct give way to reason. Whilst the laws
of nature oblige the will only conditionally, the laws of reason oblige
absolutely and without conditions.

But nature obstinately maintains her rights, and as it is never by the
result of free choice that she solicits us, she also does not withdraw
any of her exigencies as long as she has not been satisfied. Since, from
the first cause which gave the impulsion to the threshold of the will
where its jurisdiction ends, all in her is rigorously necessary,
consequently she can neither give way nor go back, but must always go
forward and press more and more the will on which depends the
satisfaction of her wants. Sometimes, it is true, we could say that
nature shortens her road and acts immediately as a cause for the
satisfaction of her needs without having in the first instance carried
her request before the will. In such a case, that is to say, if man not
simply allowed instinct to follow a free course, but if instinct took
this course of itself, man would be no more than the brute. But it is
very doubtful whether this case would ever present itself, and if ever it
were really presented it would remain to be seen whether we should not
blame the will itself for this blind power which the instinct would have
usurped.

Thus the appetitive faculty claims with persistence the satisfaction of
its wants, and the will is solicited to procure it; but the will should
receive from the reason the motives by which she determines. What does
the reason permit? What does she prescribe? This is what the will
should decide upon. Well, then, if the will turns towards the reason
before consenting to the request of the instinct, it is properly a moral
act; but if it immediately decides, without consulting the reason, it is
a physical act.

Every time, then, that nature manifests an exigence and seeks to draw the
will along with it by the blind violence of affective movement, it is the
duty of the will to order nature to halt until reason has pronounced.
The sentence which reason pronounces, will it be favorable or the
contrary to the interest of sensuousness? This is, up to the present
time, what the will does not know. Also it should observe this conduct
for all the affective movements without exception, and when it is nature
which has spoken the first, never allow it to act as an immediate cause.
Man would testify only by that to his independence. It is when, by an
act of his will, he breaks the violence of his desires, which hasten
towards the object which should satisfy them, and would dispense entirely
with the co-operation of the will,--it is only then that he reveals
himself in quality of a moral being, that is to say, as a free agent,
which does not only allow itself to experience either aversion or desire,
but which at all times must will his aversions and his desires.

But this act of taking previously the advice of reason is already an
attempt against nature, who is a competent judge in her own cause, and
who will not allow her sentences to be submitted to a new and strange
jurisdiction; this act of the will which thus brings the appetitive
faculty before the tribunal of reason is then, in the proper acceptation
of the word, an act against nature, in that it renders accidental that
which is necessary, in that it attributes to the laws of reason the right
to decide in a cause where the laws of nature can alone pronounce, and
where they have pronounced effectively. Just, in fact, as the reason in
the exercise of its moral jurisdiction is little troubled to know if the
decisions it can come to will satisfy or not the sensuous nature, so the
sensuous in the exercise of the right which is proper to it does not
trouble itself whether its decisions would satisfy pure reason or not.
Each is equally necessary, though different in necessity, and this
character of necessity would be destroyed if it were permitted for one to
modify arbitrarily the decisions of the other. This is why the man who
has the most moral energy cannot, whatever resistance he opposes to
instinct, free himself from sensuousness, or stifle desire, but can only
deny it an influence upon the decisions of his will; he can disarm
instinct by moral means, but he cannot appease it but by natural means.
By his independent force he may prevent the laws of nature from
exercising any constraint over his will, but he can absolutely change
nothing of the laws themselves.

Thus in the affective movements in which nature (instinct) acts the first
and seeks to do without the will, or to draw it violently to its side,
the morality of character cannot manifest itself but by its resistance,
and there is but one means of preventing the instinct from restraining
the liberty of the will: it is to restrain the instinct itself. Thus we
can only have agreement between the law of reason and the affective
phenomena, under the condition of putting both in discord with the
exigencies of instinct. And as nature never gives way to moral reasons,
and recalls her claims, and as on her side, consequently, all remains in
the same state, in whatever manner the will acts towards her, it results
that there is no possible accord between the inclination and duty,
between reason and sense; and that here man cannot act at the same time
with all his being and with all the harmony of his nature, but
exclusively with his reasonable nature. Thus in these sorts of actions
we could not find moral beauty, because an action is morally good only as
far as inclination has taken part in it, and here the inclination
protests against much more than it concurs with it. But these actions
have moral grandeur, because all that testifies to a preponderating
authority exercised over the sensuous nature has grandeur, and grandeur
is found only there.

It is, then, in the affective movements that this great soul of which we
speak transforms itself and becomes sublime; and it is the touchstone to
distinguish the soul truly great from what is called a good heart, or
from the virtue of temperament. When in man the inclination is ranged on
the side of morality only because morality itself is happily on the side
of inclination, it will happen that the instinct of nature in the
affective movements will exercise upon the will a full empire, and if a
sacrifice is necessary it is the moral nature, and not the sensuous
nature, that will make it. If, on the contrary, it is reason itself
which has made the inclination pass to the side of duty (which is the
case in the fine character), and which has only confided the rudder to
the sensuous nature, it will be always able to retake it as soon as the
instinct should misuse its full powers. Thus the virtue of temperament
in the affective movements falls back to the state of simple production
of nature, whilst the noble soul passes to heroism and rises to the rank
of pure intelligence.

The rule over the instincts by moral force is the emancipation of mind,
and the expression by which this independence presents itself to the eyes
in the world of phenomena is what is called dignity.

To consider this rigorously: the moral force in man is susceptible of no
representation, for the super-sensuous could not explain itself by a
phenomenon that falls under the sense; but it can be represented
indirectly to the mind by sensuous signs, and this is actually the case
with dignity in the configuration of man.

When the instinct of nature is excited, it is accompanied just as the
heart in its moral emotions is, by certain movements of the body, which
sometimes go before the will, sometimes, even as movements purely
sympathetic, escape altogether its empire. In fact, as neither
sensation, nor the desire, nor aversion, are subject to the free
arbitration of man, man has no right over the physical movements which
immediately depend on it. But the instinct does not confine itself to
simple desire; it presses, it advances, it endeavors to realize its
object; and if it does not meet in the autonomy of the mind an energetic
resistance, it will even anticipate it, it will itself take the
initiative of those sorts of acts over which the will alone has the right
to pronounce. For the instinct of conservation tends without ceasing to
usurp the legislative powers in the domain of the will, and its efforts
go to exercise over man a domination as absolute as over the beast.
There are, then, two sorts of distinct movements, which, in themselves
and by their origin, in each affective phenomenon, arise in man by the
instinct of conservation: those firstly which immediately proceed from
sensation, and which, consequently, are quite involuntary; then those
which in principle could and would be voluntary, but from which the blind
instinct of nature takes all freedom. The first refer to the affection
itself, and are united necessarily with it; the others respond rather to
the cause and to the object of the affections, and are thus accidental
and susceptible of modification, and cannot be mistaken for infallible
signs of the affective phenomena. But as both one and the other, when
once the object is determined, are equally necessary to the instinct of
nature, so they assist, both one and the other, the expression of
affective phenomena; a necessary competition, in order that the
expression should be complete and form a harmonious whole.

If, then, the will is sufficiently independent to repress the aggressions
of instinct and to maintain its rights against this blind force, all the
phenomena which the instinct of nature, once excited, produce, in its
proper domain, will preserve, it is true, their force; but those of the
second kind, those which came out of a foreign jurisdiction, and which it
pretended to subject arbitrarily to its power, these phenomena would not
take place. Thus the phenomena are no longer in harmony; but it is
precisely in their opposition that consists the expression of the moral
force. Suppose that we see a man a prey to the most poignant affection,
manifested by movements of the first kind, by quite involuntary
movements. His veins swell, his muscles contract convulsively, his voice
is stifled, his chest is raised and projects, whilst the lower portion of
the torso is sunken and compressed; but at the same time the voluntary
movements are soft, the features of the face free, and serenity beams
forth from the brow and in the look. If man were only a physical being,
all his traits, being determined only by one and the same principle,
would be in unison one with the other, and would have a similar
expression. Here, for example, they would unite in expressing
exclusively suffering; but as those traits which express calmness are
mixed up with those which express suffering, and as similar causes do not
produce opposite effects, we must recognize in this contrast the presence
and the action of a moral force, independent of the passive affections,
and superior to the impressions beneath which we see sensuous nature give
way. And this is why calmness under suffering, in which properly
consists dignity, becomes--indirectly, it is true, and by means of
reasoning--a representation of the pure intelligence which is in man, and
an expression of his moral liberty. But it is not only under suffering,
in the restricted sense of the word, in the sense in which it marks only
the painful affections, but generally in all the cases in which the
appetitive faculty is strongly interested, that mind ought to show its
liberty, and that dignity ought to be the dominant expression. Dignity
is not less required in the agreeable affections than in the painful
affections, because in both cases nature would willingly play the part of
master, and has to be held in check by the will. Dignity relates to the
form and not to the nature of the affection, and this is why it can be
possible that often an affection, praiseworthy in the main, but one to
which we blindly commit ourselves, degenerates, from the want of dignity,
into vulgarity and baseness; and, on the contrary, a condemnable
affection, as soon as it testifies by its form to the empire of the mind
over the senses, changes often its character and approaches even towards
the sublime.

Thus in dignity the mind reigns over the body and bears itself as ruler:
here it has its independence to defend against imperious impulse, always
ready to do without it, to act and shake off its yoke. But in grace, on
the contrary, the mind governs with a liberal government, for here the
mind itself causes sensuous nature to act, and it finds no resistance to
overcome. But obedience only merits forbearance, and severity is only
justifiable when provoked by opposition.

Thus grace is nothing else than the liberty of voluntary movements, and
dignity consists in mastering involuntary movements. Grace leaves to
sensuous nature, where it obeys the orders of the mind, a certain air of
independence; dignity, on the contrary, submits the sensuous nature to
mind where it would make the pretensions to rule; wherever instinct takes
the initiative and allows itself to trespass upon the attributes of the
will, the will must show it no indulgence, but it must testify to its own
independence (autonomy), in opposing to it the most energetic resistance.
If, on the contrary, it is the will that commences, and if instinct does
but follow it, the free arbitration has no longer to display any rigor,
now it must show indulgence. Such is in a few words the law which ought
to regulate the relation of the two natures of man in what regards the
expression of this relation in the world of phenomena.

It follows that dignity is required, and is seen particularly in passive
affection, whilst grace is shown in the conduct, for it is only in
suffering that the liberty of the soul can be manifested, and only in
action that the liberty of the body can be displayed.

If dignity is an expression of resistance opposed to instinct by moral
liberty, and if the instinct consequently ought to be considered as a
force that renders resistance necessary, it follows that dignity is
ridiculous where you have no force of this kind to resist, and
contemptible where there ought not to be any such force to combat. We
laugh at a comedian, whatever rank or condition he may occupy, who even
in indifferent actions affects dignity. We despise those small souls
who, for having accomplished an ordinary action, and often for having
simply abstained from a base one, plume themselves on their dignity.

Generally, what is demanded of virtue is not properly speaking dignity,
but grace. Dignity is implicitly contained in the idea of virtue, which
even by its nature supposes already the rule of man over his instincts.
It is rather sensuous nature that, in the fulfilment of moral duties, is
found in a state of oppression and constraint, particularly when it
consummates in a painful sacrifice. But as the ideal of perfection in
man does not require a struggle, but harmony between the moral and
physical nature, this ideal is little compatible with dignity, which is
only the expression of a struggle between the two natures, and as such
renders visible either the particular impotence of the individual, or the
impotence common to the species. In the first case, when the want of
harmony between inclination and duty, with regard to a moral act, belongs
to the particular powerlessness of the subject, the act would always lose
its moral value, in as far as that combat is necessary, and, in
consequence, proportionally as there would be dignity in the exterior
expression of this act; for our moral judgment connects each individual
with the common measure of the species, and we do not allow man to be
stopped by other limits than those of human nature.

In the second case, when the action commanded by duty cannot be placed in
harmony with the exigencies of instinct without going against the idea of
human nature, the resistance of the inclination is necessary, and then
only the sight of the combat can convince us of the possibility of
victory. Thus we ask here of the features and attitudes an expression of
this interior struggle, not being able to take upon ourselves to believe
in virtue where there is no trace of humanity. Where then the moral law
commands of us an action which necessarily makes the sensuous nature
suffer, there the matter is serious, and ought not to be treated as play;
ease and lightness in accomplishing this act would be much more likely to
revolt us than to satisfy us; and thus, in consequence, expression is no
longer grace, but dignity. In general, the law which prevails here is,
that man ought to accomplish with grace all the acts that he can execute
in the sphere of human nature; and with dignity all those for the
accomplishment of which he is obliged to go beyond his nature.

In like manner as we ask of virtue to have grace, we ask of inclination
to have dignity. Grace is not less natural to inclination than dignity
to virtue, and that is evident from the idea of grace, which is all
sensuous and favorable to the liberty of physical nature, and which is
repugnant to all idea of constraint. The man without cultivation lacks
not by himself a certain degree of grace, when love or any other
affection of this kind animates him; and where do we find more grace than
in children, who are nevertheless entirely under the direction of
instinct. The danger is rather that inclination should end by making the
state of passion the dominant one, stifling the independence of mind, and
bringing about a general relaxation. Therefore in order to conciliate
the esteem of a noble sentiment--esteem can only be inspired by that
which proceeds from a moral source--the inclination must always be
accompanied by dignity. It is for that reason a person in love desires
to find dignity in the object of this passion. Dignity alone is the
warrant that it is not need which has forced, but free choice which has
chosen, that he is not desired as a thing, but esteemed as a person.

We require grace of him who obliges, dignity of the person obliged: the
first, to set aside an advantage which he has over the other, and which
might wound, ought to give to his actions, though his decision may have
been disinterested, the character of an affective movement, that thus,
from the part which he allows inclination to take, he may have the
appearance of being the one who gains the most: the second, not to
compromise by the dependence in which he put himself the honor of
humanity, of which liberty is the saintly palladium, ought to raise what
is only a pure movement of instinct to the height of an act of the will,
and in this manner, at the moment when he receives a favor, return in a
certain sense another favor.

We must censure with grace, and own our faults with dignity: to put
dignity into our remonstrances is to have the air of a man too penetrated
by his own advantage: to put grace into our confessions is to forget the
inferiority in which our fault has placed us. Do the powerful desire to
conciliate affection? Their superiority must be tempered by grace. The
feeble, do they desire to conciliate esteem? They must through dignity
rise above their powerlessness. Generally it is thought that dignity is
suitable to the throne, and every one knows that those seated upon it
desire to find in their councillors, their confessors, and in their
parliaments--grace. But that which may be good and praiseworthy in a
kingdom is not so always in the domain of taste. The prince himself
enters into this domain as soon as he descends from his throne (for
thrones have their privileges), and the crouching courtier places himself
under the saintly and free probation of this law as soon as he stands
erect and becomes again a man. The first we would counsel to supplement
from the superfluity of the second that which he himself needs, and to
give him as much of his dignity as he requires to borrow grace from him.

Although dignity and grace have each their proper domain in which they
are manifest, they do not exclude each other. They can be met with in
the same person, and even in the same state of that person. Further, it
is grace alone which guarantees and accredits dignity, and dignity alone
can give value to grace.

Dignity alone, wherever met with, testifies that the desires and
inclinations are restrained within certain limits. But what we take for
a force which moderates and rules, may it not be rather an obliteration
of the faculty of feeling (hardness)? Is it really the moral autonomy,
and may it not be rather the preponderance of another affection, and in
consequence a voluntary interested effort that restrains the outburst of
the present affection? This is what grace alone can put out of doubt in
joining itself to dignity. It is grace, I mean to say, that testifies to
a peaceful soul in harmony with itself and a feeling heart.

In like manner grace by itself shows a certain susceptibility of the
feeling faculty, and a certain harmony of sentiment. But may this not be
a certain relaxation of the mind which allows so much liberty to sensuous
nature and which opens the heart to all impressions? Is it indeed the
moral which has established this harmony between the sentiments? It is
dignity alone which can in its turn guarantee this to us in joining
itself to grace; I mean it is dignity alone which attests in the subject
an independent force, and at the moment when the will represses the
license of involuntary movement, it is by dignity that it makes known
that the liberty of voluntary movements is a simple concession on its
part.

If grace and dignity, still supported, the one by architectonic beauty
and the other by force, were united in the same person, the expression of
human nature would be accomplished in him: such a person would be
justified in the spiritual world and set at liberty in the sensuous
world. Here the two domains touch so closely that their limits are
indistinguishable. The smile that plays on the lips; this sweetly
animated look; that serenity spread over the brow--it is the liberty of
the reason which gleams forth in a softened light. This noble majesty
impressed on the face is the sublime adieu of the necessity of nature,
which disappears before the mind. Such is the ideal of human beauty
according to which the antique conceptions were formed, and we see it in
the divine forms of a Niobe, of the Apollo Belvedere, in the winged
Genius of the Borghese, and in the Muse of the Barberini palace. There,
where grace and dignity are united, we experience by turns attraction and
repulsion; attraction as spiritual creatures, and repulsion as being
sensuous creatures.

Dignity offers to us an example of subordination of sensuous nature to
moral nature--an example which we are bound to imitate, but which at the
same time goes beyond the measure of our sensuous faculty. This
opposition between the instincts of nature and the exigencies of the
moral law, exigencies, however, that we recognize as legitimate, brings
our feelings into play and awakens a sentiment that we name esteem, which
is inseparable from dignity.

With grace, on the contrary, as with beauty in general, reason finds its
demands satisfied in the world of sense, and sees with surprise one of
its own ideas presented to it, realized in the world of phenomena. This
unexpected encounter between the accident of nature and the necessity of
reason awakens in us a sentiment of joyous approval (contentment) which
calms the senses, but which animates and occupies the mind, and it
results necessarily that we are attracted by a charm towards the sensuous
object. It is this attraction which we call kindliness, or love--a
sentiment inseparable from grace and beauty.

The attraction--I mean the attraction (stimulus) not of love but of
voluptuousness--proposes to the senses a sensuous object that promises to
these the satisfaction of a want, that is to say a pleasure; the senses
are consequently solicited towards this sensuous object, and from that
springs desire, a sentiment which increases and excites the sensuous
nature, but which, on the contrary, relaxes the spiritual nature.

We can say of esteem that it inclines towards its object; of love, that
it approaches with inclination towards its object; of desire, that it
precipitates itself upon its object; with esteem, the object is reason,
and the subject is sensuous nature; with love, the object is sensuous,
and the subject is moral nature; with desire, the object and the subject
are purely sensuous.

With love alone is sentiment free, because it is pure in its principle,
and because it draws its source from the seat of liberty, from the breast
of our divine nature. Here, it is not the weak and base part of our
nature that measures itself with the greater and more noble part; it is
not the sensibility, a prey to vertigo, which gazes up at the law of
reason. It is absolute greatness which is reflected in beauty and in
grace, and satisfied in morality; it becomes the legislator even, the god
in us who plays with his own image in the world of sense. Thus love
consoles and dilates the heart, whilst esteem strains it; because here
there is nothing which could limit the heart and compress its impulses,
there being nothing higher than absolute greatness; and sensibility, from
which alone hinderance could come, is reconciled, in the breast of beauty
and of grace, with the ideas even of the mind. Love has but to descend;
esteem aspires with effort towards an object placed above it. This is
the reason that the wicked love nothing, though they are obliged to
esteem many things. This is why the well-disposed man can hardly esteem
without at once feeling love for the object. Pure spirit can only love,
but not esteem; the senses know only esteem, but not love.

The culpable man is perpetually a prey to fear, that he may meet in the
world of sense the legislator within himself; and sees an enemy in all
that bears the stamp of greatness, of beauty, and of perfection: the man,
on the contrary, in whom a noble soul breathes, knows no greater pleasure
than to meet out of himself the image or realization of the divine that
is in him; and to embrace in the world of sense a symbol of the immortal
friend he loves. Love is at the same time the most generous and the most
egotistical thing in nature; the most generous, because it receives
nothing and gives all--pure mind being only able to give and not receive;
the most egotistical, for that which he seeks in the subject, that which
he enjoys in it, is himself and never anything else.

But precisely because he who loves receives from the beloved object
nothing but that which he has himself given, it often happens that he
gives more than he has received.

The exterior senses believe to have discovered in the object that which
the internal sense alone contemplates in it, in the end believing what is
desired with ardor, and the riches belonging to the one who loves hide
the poverty of the object loved. This is the reason why love is subject
to illusion, whilst esteem and desire are never deceived. As long as the
super-excitement of the internal senses overcomes the internal senses,
the soul remains under the charm of this Platonic love, which gives place
only in duration to the delights enjoyed by the immortals. But as soon
as internal sense ceases to share its visions with the exterior sense,
these take possession of their rights and imperiously demand that which
is its due--matter. It is the terrestrial Venus who profits by the fire
kindled by the celestial Venus, and it is not rare to find the physical
instinct, so long sacrificed, revenge itself by a rule all the more
absolute. As external sense is never a dupe to illusion, it makes this
advantage felt with a brutal insolence over its noble rival; and it
possesses audacity to the point of asserting that it has settled an
account that the spiritual nature had left under sufferance.

Dignity prevents love from degenerating into desire, and grace, from
esteem turning into fear. True beauty, true grace, ought never to cause
desire. Where desire is mingled, either the object wants dignity, or he
who considers it wants morality in his sentiments. True greatness ought
never to cause fear. If fear finds a place, you may hold for certain
either that the object is wanting in taste and grace, or that he who
considers it is not at peace with his conscience.

Attraction, charm, grace: words commonly employed as synonyms, but which
are not, or ought not to be so, the idea they express being capable of
many determinations, requiring different designations.

There is a kind of grace which animates, and another which calms the
heart. One touches nearly the sphere of the senses, and the pleasure
which is found in these, if not restrained by dignity, would easily
degenerate into concupiscence; we may use the word attraction [Reiz] to
designate this grace. A man with whom the feelings have little
elasticity does not find in himself the necessary force to awaken his
affections: he needs to borrow it from without and to seek from
impressions which easily exercise the phantasy, by rapid transition from
sentiment to action, in order to establish in himself the elasticity he
had lost. It is the advantage that he will find in the society of an
attractive person, who by conversation and look would stir his
imagination and agitate this stagnant water.

The calming grace approaches more nearly to dignity, inasmuch as it
manifests itself through the moderation which it imposes upon the
impetuosity of the movements. It is to this the man addresses himself
whose imagination is over-excited; it is in this peaceful atmosphere that
the heart seeks repose after the violence of the storm. It is to this
that I reserve especially the appellation of grace. Attraction is not
incompatible with laughter, jest, or the sting of raillery; grace agrees
only with sympathy and love.

Dignity has also its degrees and its shades. If it approaches grace and
beauty, it takes the name of nobleness; if, on the contrary, it inclines
towards the side of fear, it becomes haughtiness.

The utmost degree of grace is ravishing charm. Dignity, in its highest
form, is called majesty. In the ravishing we love our Ego, and we feel
our being fused with the object. Liberty in its plenitude and in its
highest enjoyment tends to the complete destruction of liberty, and the
excitement of the mind to the delirium of the voluptuousness of the
senses. Majesty, on the contrary, proposes to us a law, a moral ideal,
which constrains us to turn back our looks upon ourselves. God is there,
and the sentiment we have of His presence makes us bend our eyes upon the
ground. We forget all that is without ourselves, and we feel but the
heavy burden of our own existence.

Majesty belongs to what is holy. A man capable of giving us an idea of
holiness possesses majesty, and if we do not go so far as to kneel, our
mind at least prostrates itself before him. But the mind recoils at once
upon the slightest trace of human imperfection which he discovers in the
object of his adoration, because that which is only comparatively great
cannot subdue the heart.

Power alone, however terrible or without limit we may suppose it to be,
can never confer majesty. Power imposes only upon the sensuous being;
majesty should act upon the mind itself, and rob it of its liberty. A
man who can pronounce upon me a sentence of death has neither more nor
less of majesty for me the moment I am what I ought to be. His advantage
over me ceases as soon as I insist on it. But he who offers to me in his
person the image of pure will, before him I would prostrate myself, if it
is possible, for all eternity.

Grace and dignity are too high in value for vanity and stupidity not to
be excited to appropriate them by imitation. There is only one means of
attaining this: it is to imitate the moral state of which they are the
expression. All other imitation is but to ape them, and would be
recognized directly through exaggeration.

Just as exaggeration of the sublime leads to inflation, and affectation
of nobleness to preciosity, in the same manner affectation of grace ends
in coquetry, and that of dignity to stiff solemnity, false gravity.

There where true grace simply used ease and provenance, affected grace
becomes effeminacy. One is content to use discreetly the voluntary
movements, and not thwart unnecessarily the liberty of nature; the other
has not even the heart to use properly the organs of will, and, not to
fall into hardness and heaviness, it prefers to sacrifice something of
the aim of movement, or else it seeks to reach it by cross ways and
indirect means. An awkward and stiff dancer expends as much force as if
he had to work a windmill; with his feet and arms he describes lines as
angular as if he were tracing figures with geometrical precision; the
affected dancer, on the other hand, glides with an excess of delicacy, as
if he feared to injure himself on coming in contact with the ground, and
his feet and hands describe only lines in sinuous curves. The other sex,
which is essentially in possession of true grace, is also that one which
is more frequently culpable of affected grace, but this affectation is
never more distasteful than when used as a bait to desire. The smile of
true grace thus gives place to the most repulsive grimace; the fine play
of look, so ravishing when it displays a true sentiment, is only
contortion; the melodious inflections of the voice, an irresistible
attraction from candid lips, are only a vain cadence, a tremulousness
which savors of study: in a word, all the harmonious charms of woman
become only deception, an artifice of the toilet.

If we have many occasions to observe the affected grace in the theatre
and in the ball-room, there is also often occasion of studying the
affected dignity in the cabinet of ministers and in the study-rooms of
men of science (notably at universities). True dignity is content to
prevent the domination of the affections, to keep the instinct within
just limits, but there only where it pretends to be master in the
involuntary movements; false dignity regulates with an iron sceptre even
the voluntary movements, it oppresses the moral movements, which were
sacred to true dignity, as well as the sensual movements, and destroys
all the mimic play of the features by which the soul gleams forth upon
the face. It arms itself not only against rebel nature, but against
submissive nature, and ridiculously seeks its greatness in subjecting
nature to its yoke, or, if this does not succeed, in hiding it. As if it
had vowed hatred to all that is called nature, it swathes the body in
long, heavy-plaited garments, which hide the human structure; it
paralyzes the limbs in surcharging them with vain ornaments, and goes
even the length of cutting the hair to replace this gift of nature by an
artificial production. True dignity does not blush for nature, but only
for brute nature; it always has an open and frank air; feeling gleams in
its look; calm and serenity of mind is legible upon the brow in eloquent
traits. False gravity, on the contrary, places its dignity in the lines
of its visage; it is close, mysterious, and guards its features with the
care of an actor; all the muscles of its face are tormented, all natural
and true expression disappears, and the entire man is like a sealed
letter.

But false dignity is not always wrong to keep the mimic play of its
features under sharp discipline, because it might betray more than would
be desired, a precaution true dignity has not to consider. True dignity
wishes only to rule, not to conceal nature; in false dignity, on the
contrary, nature rules the more powerfully within because it is
controlled outwardly. [Art can make use of a proper solemnity. Its
object is only to prepare the mind for something important. When the
poet is anxious to produce a great impression he tunes the mind to
receive it.]




ON THE NECESSARY LIMITATIONS IN THE USE OF BEAUTY OF FORM.


The abuse of the beautiful and the encroachments of imagination, when,
having only the casting vote, it seeks to grasp the law-giving sceptre,
has done great injury alike in life and in science. It is therefore
highly expedient to examine very closely the bounds that have been
assigned to the use of beautiful forms. These limits are embodied in the
very nature of the beautiful, and we have only to call to mind how taste
expresses its influence to be able to determine how far it ought to
extend it.

The following are the principal operations of taste; to bring the
sensuous and spiritual powers of man into harmony, and to unite them in a
close alliance. Consequently, whenever such an intimate alliance between
reason and the senses is suitable and legitimate, taste may be allowed
influence. But taste reaches the bounds which it is not permitted to
pass without defeating its end or removing us from our duty, in all cases
where the bond between mind and matter is given up for a time, where we
must act for the time as purely creatures of reason, whether it be to
attain an end or to perform a duty. Cases of this kind do really occur,
and they are even incumbent on us in carrying out our destiny.

For we are destined to obtain knowledge and to act from knowledge. In
both cases a certain readiness is required to exclude the senses from
that which the spirit does, because feelings must be abstracted from
knowledge, and passion or desire from every moral act of the will.

When we know, we take up an active attitude, and our attention is
directed to an object, to a relation between different representations.
When we feel, we have a passive attitude, and our attention--if we may
call that so, which is no conscious operation of the mind--is only
directed to our own condition, as far as it is modified by the impression
received. Now, as we only feel and do not know the beautiful, we do not
distinguish any relation between it and other objects, we do not refer
its representation to other representations, but to ourselves who have
experienced the impression. We learn or experience nothing in the
beautiful object, but we perceive a change occasioned by it in our own
condition, of which the impression produced is the expression.
Accordingly our knowledge is not enlarged by judgments of taste, and no
knowledge, not even that of beauty, is obtained by the feeling of beauty.
Therefore, when knowledge is the object, taste can give us no help, at
least directly and immediately; on the contrary, knowledge is shut out as
long as we are occupied with beauty.

But it may be objected, What is the use then of a graceful embodiment of
conceptions, if the object of the discussion or treatise, which is simply
and solely to produce knowledge, is rather hindered than benefited by
ornament? To convince the understanding this gracefulness of clothing
can certainly avail as little as the tasteful arrangement of a banquet
can satisfy the appetite of the guests, or the outward elegance of a
person can give a clue to his intrinsic worth. But just as the appetite
is excited by the beautiful arrangement of the table, and attention is
directed to the elegant person in question, by the attractiveness of the
exterior, so also we are placed in a favorable attitude to receive truth
by the charming representation given of it; we are led to open our souls
to its reception, and the obstacles are removed from our minds which
would have otherwise opposed the difficult pursuit of a long and strict
concatenation of thought. It is never the contents, the substance, that
gains by the beauty of form; nor is it the understanding that is helped
by taste in the act of knowing. The substance, the contents, must
commend themselves to the understanding directly, of themselves; whilst
the beautiful form speaks to the imagination, and flatters it with an
appearance of freedom.

But even further limitations are necessary in this innocent subserviency
to the senses, which is only allowed in the form, without changing
anything in the substance. Great moderation must be always used, and
sometimes the end in view may be completely defeated according to the
kind of knowledge and degree of conviction aimed at in imparting our
views to others. There is a scientific knowledge, which is based on
clear conceptions and known principles; and a popular knowledge, which is
founded on feelings more or less developed. What may be very useful to
the latter is quite possibly adverse to the former.

When the object in view is to produce a strict conviction on principles,
it is not sufficient to present the truth only in respect to its contents
or subject; the test of the truth must at the same time be contained in
the manner of its presentation. But this can mean nothing else than that
not only the contents, but also the mode of stating them, must be
according to the laws of thought. They must be connected in the
presentation with the same strict logical sequence with which they are
chained together in the seasonings of the understanding; the stability of
the representation must guarantee that of the ideas. But the strict
necessity with which the understanding links together reasonings and
conclusions, is quite antagonistic to the freedom granted to imagination
in matters of knowledge. By its very nature, the imagination strives
after perceptions, that is, after complete and completely determinate
representations, and is indefatigably active to represent the universal
in one single case, to limit it in time and space, to make of every
conception an individual, and to give a body to abstractions. Moreover,
the imagination likes freedom in its combinations, and admits no other
law in them than the accidental connection with time and space; for this
is the only connection that remains to our representations, if we
separate from them in thought all that is conception, all that binds them
internally and substantially together. The understanding, following a
diametrically opposite course, only occupies itself with part
representations or conceptions, and its effort is directed to distinguish
features in the living unity of a perception. The understanding proceeds
on the same principles in putting together and taking to pieces, but it
can only combine things by part-representations, just as it can separate
them; for it only unites, according to their inner relations, things that
first disclosed themselves in their separation.

The understanding observes a strict necessity and conformity with laws in
its combinations, and it is only the consistent connection of ideas that
satisfies it. But this connection is destroyed as often as the
imagination insinuates entire representations (individual cases) in this
chain of abstractions, and mixes up the accidents of time with the strict
necessity of a chain of circumstances. Accordingly, in every case where
it is essential to carry out a rigidly accurate sequence of reasoning,
imagination must forego its capricious character; and its endeavor to
obtain all possible sensuousness in conceptions, and all freedom in their
combination, must be made subordinate and sacrificed to the necessity of
the understanding. From this it follows that the exposition must be so
fashioned as to overthrow this effort of the imagination by the exclusion
of all that is individual and sensuous. The poetic impulse of
imagination must be curbed by distinctness of expression, and its
capricious tendency to combine must be limited by a strictly legitimate
course of procedure. I grant that it will not bend to this yoke without
resistance; but in this matter reliance is properly placed on a certain
amount of self-denial, and on an earnest determination of the hearer or
reader not to be deterred by the difficulties accompanying the form, for
the sake of the subject-matter. But in all cases where no sufficient
dependence can be placed on this self-denial, or where the interest felt
in the subject-matter is insufficient to inspire courage for such an
amount of exertion, it is necessary to resign the idea of imparting
strictly scientific knowledge; and to gain instead greater latitude in
the form of its presentation. In such a case it is expedient to abandon
the form of science, which exercises too great violence over the
imagination, and can only be made acceptable through the importance of
the object in view. Instead of this, it is proper to choose the form of
beauty, which, independent of the contents or subject, recommends itself
by its very appearance. As the matter cannot excuse the form in this
case, the form must trespass on the matter.

Popular instruction is compatible with this freedom. By the term popular
speakers or popular writers I imply all those who do not direct their
remarks exclusively to the learned. Now, as these persons do not address
any carefully trained body of hearers or readers, but take them as they
find them, they must only assume the existence of the general conditions
of thought, only the universal impulses that call attention, but no
special gift of thinking, no acquaintance with distinct conceptions, nor
any interest in special subjects. These lecturers and authors must not
be too particular as to whether their audience or readers assign by their
imagination a proper meaning to their abstractions, or whether they will
furnish a proper subject-matter for the universal conceptions to which
the scientific discourse is limited. In order to pursue a safer, easier
course, these persons will present along with their ideas the perceptions
and separate cases to which they relate, and they leave it to the
understanding of the reader to form a proper conception impromptu.
Accordingly, the faculty of imagination is much more mixed up with a
popular discourse, but only to reproduce, to renew previously received
representations, and not to produce, to express its own self-creating
power. Those special cases or perceptions are much too certainly
calculated for the object on hand, and much too closely applied to the
use that is to be made of them, to allow the imagination ever to forget
that it only acts in the service of the understanding. It is true that a
discourse of this popular kind holds somewhat closer to life and the
world of sense, but it does not become lost in it. The mode of
presenting the subject is still didactic; for in order to be beautiful it
is still wanting in the two most distinguished features of beauty,
sensuousness of expression and freedom of movement.

The mode of presenting a theme may be called free when the understanding,
while determining the connection of ideas, does so with so little
prominence that the imagination appears to act quite capriciously in the
matter, and to follow only the accident of time. The presentation of a
subject becomes sensuous when it conceals the general in the particular,
and when the fancy gives the living image (the whole representation),
where attention is merely concerned with the conception (the part
representation). Accordingly, sensuous presentation is, viewed in one
aspect, rich, for in cases where only one condition is desired, a
complete picture, an entirety of conditions, an individual is offered.
But viewed in another aspect it is limited and poor, because it only
confines to a single individual and a single case what ought to be
understood of a whole sphere. It therefore curtails the understanding in
the same proportion that it grants preponderance to the imagination; for
the completer a representation is in substance, the smaller it is in
compass.

It is the interest of the imagination to change objects according to its
caprice; the interest of the understanding is to unite its
representations with strict logical necessity.

To satisfy the imagination, a discourse must have a material part, a
body; and these are formed by the perceptions, from which the
understanding separates distinct features or conceptions. For though we
may attempt to obtain the highest pitch of abstraction, something
sensuous always lies at the ground of the thought. But imagination
strives to pass unfettered and lawless from one conception to another
conception, and seeks not to be bound by any other connection than that
of time. So when the perceptions that constitute the bodily part of a
discourse have no concatenation as things, when they appear rather to
stand apart as independent limbs and separate unities, when they betray
the utter disorder of a sportive imagination, obedient to itself alone,
then the clothing has aesthetic freedom and the wants of the fancy are
satisfied. A mode of presentation such as this might be styled an
organic product, in which not only the whole lives, but also each part
has its individual life. A merely scientific presentation is a
mechanical work, when the parts, lifeless in themselves, impart by their
connection an artificial life to the whole.

On the other hand, a discourse, in order to satisfy the understanding and
to produce knowledge, must have a spiritual part, it must have
significance, and it receives this through the conceptions, by means of
which those perceptions are referred to one another and united into a
whole. The problem of satisfying the understanding by conformity with
law, while the imagination is flattered by being set free from
restrictions, is solved thus: by obtaining the closest connection between
the conceptions forming the spiritual part of the discourse, while the
perceptions, corresponding to them and forming the sensuous part of the
discourse, appear to cohere merely through an arbitrary play of the
fancy.

If an inquiry be instituted into the magic influence of a beautiful
diction, it will always be found that it consists in this happy relation
between external freedom and internal necessity. The principal features
that contribute to this freedom of the imagination are the
individualizing of objects and the figurative or inexact expression of a
thing; the former employed to give force to its sensuousness, the latter
to produce it where it does not exist. When we express a species or kind
by an individual, and portray a conception in a single case, we remove
from fancy the chains which the understanding has placed upon her and
give her the power to act as a creator. Always grasping at completely
determinate images, the imagination obtains and exercises the right to
complete according to her wish the image afforded to her, to animate it,
to fashion it, to follow it in all the associations and transformations
of which it is capable. She may forget for a moment her subordinate
position, and act as an independent power, only self-directing, because
the strictness of the inner concatenation has sufficiently guarded
against her breaking loose from the control of the understanding. An
inexact or figurative expression adds to the liberty, by associating
ideas which in their nature differ essentially from one another, but
which unite in subordination to the higher idea. The imagination adheres
to the concrete object, the understanding to this higher idea, and thus
the former finds movement and variety even where the other verifies a
most perfect continuity. The conceptions are developed according to the
law of necessity, but they pass before the imagination according to the
law of liberty.

Thought remains the same; the medium that represents it is the only thing
that changes. It is thus that an eloquent writer knows how to extract
the most splendid order from the very centre of anarchy, and that he
succeeds in erecting a solid structure on a constantly moving ground, on
the very torrent of imagination.

If we compare together scientific statement or address, popular address,
and fine language, it is seen directly that all three express the idea
with an equal faithfulness as regards the matter, and consequently that
all three help us to acquire knowledge, but that as regards the mode and
degree of this knowledge a very marked difference exists between them.
The writer who uses the language of the beautiful rather represents the
matter of which he treats as possible and desirable than indulges in
attempts to convince us of its reality, and still less of its necessity.
His thought does in fact only present itself as an arbitrary creation of
the imagination, which is never qualified, in itself, to guarantee the
reality of what it represents. No doubt the popular writer leads us to
believe that the matter really is as he describes it, but does not
require anything more firm; for, though he may make the truth of a
proposition credible to our feelings, he does not make it absolutely
certain. Now, feeling may always teach us what is, but not what must be.
The philosophical writer raises this belief to a conviction, for he
proves by undeniable reasons that the matter is necessarily so.

Starting from the principle that we have just established, it will not be
difficult to assign its proper part and sphere to each of the three forms
of diction. Generally it may be laid down as a rule that preference
ought to be given to the scientific style whenever the chief
consideration is not only the result, but also the proofs. But when the
result merely is of the most essential importance the advantage must be
given to popular elocution and fine language. But it may be asked in
what cases ought popular elocution to rise to a fine, a noble style?
This depends on the degree of interest in the reader, or which you wish
to excite in his mind.

The purely scientific statement may incline either to popular discourse
or to philosophic language, and according to this bias it places us more
or less in possession of some branch of knowledge. All that popular
elocution does is to lend us this knowledge for a momentary pleasure or
enjoyment. The first, if I may be allowed the comparison, gives us a
tree with its roots, though with the condition that we wait patiently for
it to blossom and bear fruit. The other, or fine diction, is satisfied
with gathering its flowers and fruits, but the tree that bore them does
not become our property, and when once the flowers are faded and the
fruit is consumed our riches depart. It would therefore be equally
unreasonable to give only the flower and fruit to a man who wishes the
whole tree to be transplanted into his garden, and to offer the whole
tree with its fruit in the germ to a man who only looks for the ripe
fruit. The application of the comparison is self-evident, and I now only
remark that a fine ornate style is as little suited to the professor's
chair as the scholastic style to a drawing-room, the pulpit, or the bar.

The student accumulates in view of an ulterior end and for a future use;
accordingly the professor ought to endeavor to transmit the full and
entire property of the knowledge that he communicates to him. Now,
nothing belongs to us as our own but what has been communicated to the
understanding. The orator, on the other hand, has in view an immediate
end, and his voice must correspond with an immediate want of the public.
His interest is to make his knowledge practically available as soon as
possible; and the surest way is to hand it over to the senses, and to
prepare it for the use of sensation. The professor, who only admits
hearers on certain conditions, and who is entitled to suppose in his
hearers the dispositions of mind in which a man ought to be to receive
the truth, has only in view in his lecture the object of which he is
treating; while the orator, who cannot make any conditions with his
audience, and who needs above everything sympathy, to secure it on his
side, must regulate his action and treatment according to the subjects on
which he turns his discourse. The hearers of the professor have already
attended his lectures, and will attend them again; they only want
fragments that will form a whole after having been linked to the
preceding lectures. The audience of the orator is continually renewed;
it comes unprepared, and perhaps will not return; accordingly in every
address the orator must finish what he wishes to do; each of his
harangues must form a whole and contain expressly and entirely his
conclusion.

It is not therefore surprising that a dogmatic composition or address,
however solid, should not have any success either in conversation or in
the pulpit, nor that a fine diction, whatever wit it may contain, should
not bear fruit in a professor's chair. It is not surprising that the
fashionable world should not read writings that stand out in relief in
the scientific world, and that the scholar and the man of science are
ignorant of works belonging to the school of worldly people that are
devoured greedily by all lovers of the beautiful. Each of these works
may be entitled to admiration in the circle to which it belongs; and more
than this, both, fundamentally, may be quite of equal value; but it would
be requiring an impossibility to expect that the work which demands all
the application of the thinker should at the same time offer an easy
recreation to the man who is only a fine wit.

For the same reason I consider that it is hurtful to choose for the
instruction of youth books in which scientific matters are clothed in an
attractive style. I do not speak here of those in which the substance is
sacrificed to the form, but of certain writings really excellent, which
are sufficiently well digested to stand the strictest examination, but
which do not offer their proofs by their very form. No doubt books of
this kind attain their end, they are read; but this is always at the cost
of a more important end, the end for which they ought to be read. In
this sort of reading the understanding is never exercised save in as far
as it agrees with the fancy; it does not learn to distinguish the form
from the substance, nor to act alone as pure understanding. And yet the
exercise of the pure understanding is in itself an essential and capital
point in the instruction of youth; and very often the exercise itself of
thought is much more important than the object on which it is exercised.
If you wish for a matter to be done seriously, be very careful not to
announce it as a diversion. It is preferable, on the contrary, to secure
attention and effort by the very form that is employed, and to use a kind
of violence to draw minds over from the passive to an active state. The
professor ought never to hide from his pupil the exact regularity of the
method; he ought rather to fix his attention on it, and if possible to
make him desire this strictness. The student ought to learn to pursue an
end, and in the interest of that end to put up with a difficult process.
He ought early to aspire to that loftier satisfaction which is the reward
of exertion. In a scientific lecture the senses are altogether set
aside; in an aesthetic address it is wished to interest them. What is
the result? A writing or conversation of the aesthetic class is devoured
with interest; but questions are put as to its conclusions; the hearer is
scarcely able to give an answer. And this is quite natural, as here the
conceptions reach the mind only in entire masses, and the understanding
only knows what it analyzes. The mind during a lecture of this kind is
more passive than active, and the intellect only possesses what it has
produced by its own activity.

However, all this applies only to the vulgarly beautiful, and to a vulgar
fashion of perceiving beauty. True beauty reposes on the strictest
limitation, on the most exact definition, on the highest and most
intimate necessity. Only this limitation ought rather to let itself be
sought for than be imposed violently. It requires the most perfect
conformity to law, but this must appear quite natural. A product that
unites these conditions will fully satisfy the understanding as soon as
study is made of it. But exactly because this result is really
beautiful, its conformity is not expressed; it does not take the
understanding apart to address it exclusively; it is a harmonious unity
which addresses the entire man--all his faculties together; it is nature
speaking to nature.

A vulgar criticism may perhaps find it empty, paltry, and too little
determined. He who has no other knowledge than that of distinguishing,
and no other sense than that for the particular, is actually pained by
what is precisely the triumph of art, this harmonious unity where the
parts are blended in a pure entirety. No doubt it is necessary, in a
philosophical discourse, that the understanding, as a faculty of
analysis, find what will satisfy it; it must obtain single concrete
results; this is the essential that must not by any means be lost sight
of. But if the writer, while giving all possible precision to the
substance of his conceptions, has taken the necessary measures to enable
the understanding, as soon as it will take the trouble, to find of
necessity these truths, I do not see that he is a less good writer
because he has approached more to the highest perfection. Nature always
acts as a harmonious unity, and when she loses this in her efforts after
abstraction, nothing appears more urgent to her than to re-establish it,
and the writer we are speaking of is not less commendable if he obeys
nature by attaching to the understanding what had been separated by
abstraction, and when, by appealing at the same time to the sensuous and
to the spiritual faculties, he addresses altogether the entire man. No
doubt the vulgar critic will give very scant thanks to this writer for
having given him a double task. For vulgar criticism has not the feeling
for this harmony, it only runs after details, and even in the Basilica of
St. Peter would exclusively attend to the pillars on which the ethereal
edifice reposes. The fact is that this critic must begin by translating
it to understand it--in the same way that the pure understanding, left to
itself, if it meets beauty and harmony, either in nature or in art, must
begin by transferring them into its own language--and by decomposing it,
by doing in fact what the pupil does who spells before reading. But it
is not from the narrow mind of his readers that the writer who expresses
his conceptions in the language of the beautiful receives his laws. The
ideal which he carries in himself is the goal at which he aims without
troubling himself as to who follows and who remains behind. Many will
stay behind; for if it be a rare thing to find readers simply capable of
thinking, it is infinitely more rare to meet any who can think with
imagination. Thus our writer, by the force of circumstances, will fall
out, on the one hand, with those who have only intuitive ideas and
feelings, for he imposes on them a painful task by forcing them to think;
and, on the other hand, he aggravates those who only know how to think,
for he asks of them what is absolutely impossible--to give a living,
animated form to conception. But as both only represent true humanity
very imperfectly--that normal humanity which requires the absolute
harmony of these two operations--their contradictory objections have no
weight, and if their judgments prove anything, it is rather that the
author has succeeded in attaining his end. The abstract thinker finds
that the substance of the work is solidly thought; the reader of
intuitive ideas finds his style lively and animated; both consequently
find and approve in him what they are able to understand, and that alone
is wanting which exceeds their capacity.

But precisely for this very reason a writer of this class is not adapted
to make known to an ignorant reader the object of what he treats, or, in
the most proper sense of the word, to teach. Happily also, he is not
required for that, for means will not be wanting for the teaching of
scholars. The professor in the strictest acceptation is obliged to bind
himself to the needs of his scholars; the first thing he has to
presuppose is the ignorance of those who listen to him; the other, on the
other hand, demands a certain maturity and culture in his reader or
audience. Nor is his office confined to impart to them dead ideas; he
grasps the living object with a living energy, and seizes at once on the
entire man--his understanding, his heart, and his will.

We have found that it is dangerous for the soundness of knowledge to give
free scope to the exigencies of taste in teaching, properly so called.
But this does not mean by any means that the culture of this faculty in
the student is a premature thing. He must, on the contrary, be
encouraged to apply the knowledge that he has appropriated in the school
to the field of living development. When once the first point has been
observed, and the knowledge acquired, the other point, the exercise of
taste, can only have useful results. It is certain that it is necessary
to be quite the master of a truth to abandon without danger the form in
which it has been found; a great strength of understanding is required
not to lose sight of your object while giving free play to the
imagination. He who transmits his knowledge under a scholastic form
persuades me, I admit, that he has grasped these truths properly and that
he knows how to support them. But he who besides this is in a condition
to communicate them to me in a beautiful form not only proves that he is
adapted to promulgate them, he shows moreover that he has assimilated
them and that he is able to make their image pass into his productions
and into his acts. There is for the results of thought only one way by
which they can penetrate into the will and pass into life; that is, by
spontaneous imagination, only what in ourselves was already a living act
can become so out of us; and the same thing happens with the creations of
the mind as with those of organic nature, that the fruit issues only from
the flower. If we consider how many truths were living and active as
interior intuitions before philosophy showed their existence, and how
many truths most firmly secured by proofs often remain inactive on the
will and the feelings, it will be seen how important it is for practical
life to follow in this the indications of nature, and when we have
acquired a knowledge scientifically to bring it back again to the state
of a living intuition. It is the only way to enable those whose nature
has forbidden them to follow the artificial path of science to share in
the treasures of wisdom. The beautiful renders us here in relation with
knowledge what, in morals, it does in relation with conduct; it places
men in harmony on results, and on the substance of things, who would
never have agreed on the form and principles.

The other sex, by its very nature and fair destiny, cannot and ought not
to rival ours in scientific knowledge; but it can share truth with us by
the reproduction of things. Man agrees to have his taste offended,
provided compensation be given to his understanding by the increased
value of its possessions. But women do not forgive negligence in form,
whatever be the nature of the conception; and the inner structure of all
their being gives them the right to show a strict severity on this point.
The fair sex, even if it did not rule by beauty, would still be entitled
to its name because it is ruled by beauty, and makes all objects
presented to it appear before the tribunal of feeling, and all that does
not speak to feeling or belies it is lost in the opinion of women. No
doubt through this medium nothing can be made to reach the mind of woman
save the matter of truth, and not truth itself, which is inseparable from
its proofs. But happily woman only needs the matter of truth to reach
her highest perfection, and the few exceptions hitherto seen are not of a
nature to make us wish that the exception should become the rule. As,
therefore, nature has not only dispensed but cut off the other sex from
this task, man must give a double attention to it if he wishes to vie
with woman and be equal to her in what is of great interest in human
life. Consequently he will try to transfer all that he can from the
field of abstraction, where he is master, to that of imagination, of
feeling, where woman is at once a model and a judge. The mind of woman
being a ground that does not admit of durable cultivation, he will try to
make his own ground yield as many flowers and as much fruit as possible,
so as to renew as often as possible the quickly-fading produce on the
other ground, and to keep up a sort of artificial harvest where natural
harvests could not ripen. Taste corrects or hides the natural
differences of the two sexes. It nourishes and adorns the mind of woman
with the productions of that of man, and allows the fair sex to feel
without being previously fatigued by thought, and to enjoy pleasures
without having bought them with labors. Thus, save the restrictions I
have named, it is to the taste that is intrusted the care of form in
every statement by which knowledge is communicated, but under the express
condition that it will not encroach on the substance of things. Taste
must never forget that it carries out an order emanating elsewhere, and
that it is not its own affairs it is treating of. All its parts must be
limited to place our minds in a condition favorable to knowledge; over
all that concerns knowledge itself it has no right to any authority. For
it exceeds its mission, it betrays it, it disfigures the object that it
ought faithfully to transmit, it lays claim to authority out of its
proper province; if it tries to carry out there, too, its own law, which
is nothing but that of pleasing the imagination and making itself
agreeable to the intuitive faculties; if it applies this law not only to
the operation, but also to the matter itself; if it follows this rule not
only to arrange the materials, but also to choose them. When this is the
case the first consideration is not the things themselves, but the best
mode of presenting them so as to recommend them to the senses. The
logical sequence of conceptions of which only the strictness should have
been hidden from us is rejected as a disagreeable impediment. Perfection
is sacrificed to ornament, the truth of the parts to the beauty of the
whole, the inmost nature of things to the exterior impression. Now,
directly the substance is subordinated to form, properly speaking it
ceases to exist; the statement is empty, and instead of having extended
our knowledge we have only indulged in an amusing game.

The writers who have more wit than understanding and more taste than
science, are too often guilty of this deception; and readers more
accustomed to feel than to think are only too inclined to forgive them.
In general it is unsafe to give to the aesthetical sense all its culture
before having exercised the understanding as the pure thinking faculty,
and before having enriched the head with conceptions; for as taste always
looks at the carrying out and not at the basis of things, wherever it
becomes the only arbiter, there is an end of the essential difference
between things. Men become indifferent to reality, and they finish by
giving value to form and appearance only.

Hence arises that superficial and frivolous bel-esprit that we often see
hold sway in social conditions and in circles where men pride themselves,
and not unreasonably, on the finest culture. It is a fatal thing to
introduce a young man into assemblies where the Graces hold sway before
the Muses have dismissed him and owned his majority. Moreover, it can
hardly be prevented that what completes the external education of a young
man whose mind is ripe turns him who is not ripened by study into a fool.
I admit that to have a fund of conceptions, and not form, is only a half
possession. For the most splendid knowledge in a head incapable of
giving them form is like a treasure buried in the earth. But form
without substance is a shadow of riches, and all possible cleverness in
expression is of no use to him who has nothing to express.

Thus, to avoid the graces of education leading us in a wrong road, taste
must be confined to regulating the external form, while reason and
experience determine the substance and the essence of conceptions. If
the impression made on the senses is converted into a supreme criterion,
and if things are exclusively referred to sensation, man will never cease
to be in the service of matter; he will never clear a way for his
intelligence; in short, reason will lose in freedom in proportion as it
allows imagination to usurp undue influence.

The beautiful produces its effect by mere intuition; the truth demands
study. Accordingly, the man who among all his faculties has only
exercised the sense of the beautiful is satisfied even when study is
absolutely required, with a superficial view of things; and he fancies he
can make a mere play of wit of that which demands a serious effort. But
mere intuition cannot give any result. To produce something great it is
necessary to enter into the fundamental nature of things, to distinguish
them strictly, to associate them in different manners, and study them
with a steady attention. Even the artist and the poet, though both of
them labor to procure us only the pleasure of intuition, can only by most
laborious and engrossing study succeed in giving us a delightful
recreation by their works.

I believe this to be the test to distinguish the mere dilettante from the
artist of real genius. The seductive charm exercised by the sublime and
the beautiful, the fire which they kindle in the young imagination, the
apparent ease with which they place the senses under an illusion, have
often persuaded inexperienced minds to take in hand the palette or the
harp, and to transform into figures or to pour out in melody what they
felt living in their heart. Misty ideas circulate in their heads, like a
world in formation, and make them believe that they are inspired. They
take obscurity for depth, savage vehemence for strength, the undetermined
for the infinite, what has not senses for the super-sensuous. And how
they revel in these creations of their brain! But the judgment of the
connoisseur does not confirm this testimony of an excited self-love.
With his pitiless criticism he dissipates all the prestige of the
imagination and of its dreams, and carrying the torch before these
novices he leads them into the mysterious depths of science and life,
where, far from profane eyes, the source of all true beauty flows ever
towards him who is initiated. If now a true genius slumbers in the young
aspirant, no doubt his modesty will at first receive a shock; but soon
the consciousness of real talent will embolden him for the trial. If
nature has endowed him with gifts for plastic art, he will study the
structure of man with the scalpel of the anatomist; he will descend into
the lowest depths to be true in representing surfaces, and he will
question the whole race in order to be just to the individual. If he is
born to be a poet, he examines humanity in his own heart to understand
the infinite variety of scenes in which it acts on the vast theatre of
the world. He subjects imagination and its exuberant fruitfulness to the
discipline of taste, and charges the understanding to mark out in its
cool wisdom the banks that should confine the raging waters of
inspiration. He knows full well that the great is only formed of the
little--from the imperceptible. He piles up, grain by grain, the
materials of the wonderful structure, which, suddenly disclosed to our
eyes, produces a startling effect and turns our head. But if nature has
only intended him for a dilettante, difficulties damp his impotent zeal,
and one of two things happens: either he abandons, if he is modest, that
to which he was diverted by a mistaken notion of his vocation; or, if he
has no modesty, he brings back the ideal to the narrow limits of his
faculties, for want of being able to enlarge his faculties to the vast
proportions of the ideal. Thus the true genius of the artist will be
always recognized by this sign--that when most enthusiastic for the
whole, he preserves a coolness, a patience defying all obstacles, as
regards details. Moreover, in order not to do any injury to perfection,
he would rather renounce the enjoyment given by the completion. For the
simple amateur, it is the difficulty of means that disgusts him and turns
him from his aim; his dreams would be to have no more trouble in
producing than he had in conception and intuition.

I have spoken hitherto of the dangers to which we are exposed by an
exaggerated sensuousness and susceptibility to the beautiful in the form,
and from too extensive aesthetical requirements; and I have considered
these dangers in relation to the faculty of thinking and knowing. What,
then, will be the result when these pretensions of the aesthetical taste
bear on the will? It is one thing to be stopped in your scientific
progress by too great a love of the beautiful, another to see this
inclination become a cause of degeneracy in character itself, and make us
violate the law of duty. In matters of thought the caprices of "taste"
are no doubt an evil, and they must of necessity darken the intelligence;
but these same caprices applied to the maxims of the will become really
pernicious and infallibly deprave the heart. Yet this is the dangerous
extreme to which too refined an aesthetic culture brings us directly we
abandon ourselves exclusively to the feelings for the beautiful, and
directly we raise taste to the part of absolute lawgiver over our will.

The moral destination of man requires that the will should be completely
independent of all influence of sensuous instincts, and we know that
taste labors incessantly at making the link between reason and the senses
continually closer. Now this effort has certainly as its result the
ennobling of the appetites, and to make them more conformable with the
requirements of reason; but this very point may be a serious danger for
morality.

I proceed to explain my meaning. A very refined aesthetical education
accustoms the imagination to direct itself according to laws, even in its
free exercise, and leads the sensuous not to have any enjoyments without
the concurrence of reason; but it soon follows that reason, in its turn,
is required to be directed, even in the most serious operations of its
legislative power, according to the interests of imagination, and to give
no more orders to the will without the consent of the sensuous instincts.
The moral obligation of the will, which is, however, an absolute and
unconditional law, takes unperceived the character of a simple contract,
which only binds each of the contracting parties when the other fulfils
its engagement. The purely accidental agreement of duty with inclination
ends by being considered a necessary condition, and thus the principle of
all morality is quenched in its source.

How does the character become thus gradually depraved? The process may
be explained thus: So long as man is only a savage, and his instincts'
only bear on material things and a coarse egotism determines his actions,
sensuousness can only become a danger to morality by its blind strength,
and does not oppose reason except as a force. The voice of justice,
moderation, and humanity is stifled by the appetites, which make a
stronger appeal. Man is then terrible in his vengeance, because he is
terribly sensitive to insults. He robs, he kills, because his desires
are still too powerful for the feeble guidance of reason. He is towards
others like a wild beast, because the instinct of nature still rules him
after the fashion of animals.

But when to the savage state, to that of nature, succeeds civilization;
when taste ennobles the instincts, and holds out to them more worthy
objects taken from the moral order; when culture moderates the brutal
outbursts of the appetites and brings them back under the discipline of
the beautiful, it may happen that these same instincts, which were only
dangerous before by their blind power, coming to assume an air of dignity
and a certain assumed authority, may become more dangerous than before to
the morality of the character; and that, under the guise of innocence,
nobleness, and purity, they may exercise over the will a tyranny a
hundred times worse than the other.

The man of taste willingly escapes the gross thraldom of the appetites.
He submits to reason the instinct which impels him to pleasure, and he is
willing to take counsel from his spiritual and thinking nature for the
choice of the objects he ought to desire. Now, reason is very apt to
mistake a spiritualized instinct for one of its own instincts, and at
length to give up to it the guidance of the will, and this in proportion
as moral judgment and aesthetic judgment, the sense of the good and the
sense of the beautiful, meet in the same object and in the same decision.

So long as it remains possible for inclination and duty to meet in the
same object and in a common desire, this representation of the moral
sense by the aesthetic sense may not draw after it positively evil
consequences, though, if the matter be strictly considered, the morality
of particular actions does not gain by this agreement. But the
consequences will be quite different when sensuousness and reason have
each of them a different interest. If, for example, duty commands us to
perform an action that revolts our taste, or if taste feels itself drawn
towards an object which reason as a moral judge is obliged to condemn,
then, in fact, we suddenly encounter the necessity of distinguishing
between the requirements of the moral sense and those of the aesthetic
sense, which so long an agreement had almost confounded to such a degree
that they could not be distinguished. We must now determine their
reciprocal rights, and find which of them is the real master in our soul.
But such a long representation of the moral sense by the sense of the
beautiful has made us forget this master. When we have so long practised
this rule of obeying at once the suggestions of taste, and when we have
found the result always satisfactory, taste ends by assuming a kind of
appearance of right. As taste has shown itself irreproachable in the
vigilant watch it has kept over the will, we necessarily come to grant a
certain esteem to its decisions; and it is precisely to this esteem that
inclination, with captious logic, gives weight against the duties of
conscience.

Esteem is a feeling that can only be felt for law, and what corresponds
to it. Whatever is entitled to esteem lays claim to an unconditional
homage. The ennobled inclination which has succeeded in captivating our
esteem will, therefore, no longer be satisfied with being subordinate to
reason; it aspires to rank alongside it. It does not wish to be taken
for a faithless subject in revolt against his sovereign; it wishes to be
regarded as a queen; and, treating reason as its peer, to dictate, like
reason, laws to the conscience. Thus, if we listen to her, she would
weigh by right equally in the scale; and then have we not good reason to
fear that interest will decide?

Of all the inclinations that are decided from the feeling for the
beautiful and that are special to refined minds, none commends itself so
much to the moral sense as the ennobled instinct of love; none is so
fruitful in impressions which correspond to the true dignity of man. To
what an elevation does it raise human nature! and often what divine
sparks does it kindle in the common soul! It is a sacred fire that
consumes every egotistical inclination, and the very principles of
morality are scarcely a greater safeguard of the soul's chastity than
love is for the nobility of the heart. How often it happens while the
moral principles are still struggling that love prevails in their favor,
and hastens by its irresistible power the resolutions that duty alone
would have vainly demanded from weak human nature! Who, then, would
distrust an affection that protects so powerfully what is most excellent
in human nature, and which fights so victoriously against the moral foe
of all morality, egotism?

But do not follow this guide till you have secured a better. Suppose a
loved object be met that is unhappy, and unhappy because of you, and that
it depends only on you to make it happy by sacrificing a few moral
scruples. You may be disposed to say, "Shall I let this loved being
suffer for the pleasure of keeping our conscience pure? Is this
resistance required by this generous, devoted affection, always ready to
forget itself for its object? I grant it is going against conscience to
have recourse to this immoral means to solace the being we love; but can
we be said to love if in presence of this being and of its sorrow we
continue to think of ourselves? Are we not more taken up with ourselves
than with it, since we prefer to see it unhappy rather than consent to be
so ourselves by the reproaches of our conscience?" These are the
sophisms that the passion of love sets against conscience (whose voice
thwarts its interests), making its utterances despicable as suggestions
of selfishness, and representing our moral dignity as one of the
components of our happiness that we are free to alienate. Then, if the
morality of our character is not strongly backed by good principles, we
shall surrender, whatever may be the impetus of our exalted imagination,
to disgraceful acts; and we shall think that we gain a glorious victory
over our self-love, while we are only the despicable victims of this
instinct. A well-known French romance, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," gives
us a striking example of this delusion, by which love betrays a soul
otherwise pure and beautiful. The Presidente de Tourvel errs by
surprise, and seeks to calm her remorse by the idea that she has
sacrificed her virtue to her generosity.

Secondary and imperfect duties, as they are styled, are those that the
feeling for the beautiful takes most willingly under its patronage, and
which it allows to prevail on many occasions over perfect duties. As
they assign a much larger place to the arbitrary option of the subject,
and at the same time as they have the appearance of merit, which gives
them lustre, they commend themselves far more to the aesthetic taste than
perfect or necessary duties, which oblige us strictly and
unconditionally. How many people allow themselves to be unjust that they
may be generous! How many fail in their duties to society that they may
do good to an individual, and reciprocally! How many people forgive a
lie sooner than a rudeness, a crime against humanity rather than an
insult to honor! How many debase their bodies to hasten the perfection
of their minds, and degrade their character to adorn their understanding!
How many do not scruple to commit a crime when they have a laudable end
in view, pursue an ideal of political happiness through all the terrors
of anarchy, tread under foot existing laws to make way for better ones,
and do not scruple to devote the present generation to misery to secure
at this cost the happiness of future generations! The apparent
unselfishness of certain virtues gives them a varnish of purity, which
makes them rash enough to break and run counter to the moral law; and
many people are the dupes of this strange illusion, to rise higher than
morality and to endeavor to be more reasonable than reason.

The man of a refined taste is susceptible, in this respect, of a moral
corruption, from which the rude child of nature is preserved by his very
coarseness. In the latter, the opposite of the demands of sense and the
decrees of the moral law is so strongly marked and so manifest, and the
spiritual element has so small a share in his desires, that although the
appetites exercise a despotic sway over him, they cannot wrest his esteem
from him. Thus, when the savage, yielding to the superior attraction of
sense, gives way to the committal of an unjust action, he may yield to
temptation, but he will not hide from himself that he is committing a
fault, and he will do homage to reason even while he violates its
mandates. The child of civilization, on the contrary, the man of
refinement, will not admit that he commits a fault, and to soothe his
conscience he prefers to impose on it by a sophism. No doubt he wishes
to obey his appetite, but at the same time without falling in his own
esteem. How does he manage this? He begins by overthrowing the superior
authority that thwarts his inclination, and before transgressing the law
he calls in question the competence of the lawgiver. Could it be
expected that a corrupt will should so corrupt the intelligence? The
only dignity that an inclination can assume accrues to it from its
agreement with reason; yet we find that inclination, independent as well
as blind, aspires, at the very moment she enters into contest with
reason, to keep this dignity which she owes to reason alone. Nay,
inclination even aspires to use this dignity she owes to reason against
reason itself.

These are the dangers that threaten the morality of the character when
too intimate an association is attempted between sensuous instincts and
moral instincts, which can never perfectly agree in real life, but only
in the ideal. I admit that the sensuous risks nothing in this
association, because it possesses nothing except what it must give up
directly duty speaks and reason demands the sacrifice. But reason, as
the arbiter of the moral law, will run the more risk from this union if
it receives as a gift from inclination what it might enforce; for, under
the appearance of freedom, the feeling of obligation may be easily lost,
and what reason accepts as a favor may quite well be refused it when the
sensuous finds it painful to grant it. It is, therefore, infinitely
safer for the morality of the character to suspend, at least for a time,
this misrepresentation of the moral sense by the sense of the beautiful.
It is best of all that reason should command by itself without mediation,
and that it should show to the will its true master. The remark is,
therefore, quite justified, that true morality only knows itself in the
school of adversity, and that a continual prosperity becomes easily a
rock of offence to virtue. I mean here by prosperity the state of a man
who, to enjoy the goods of life, need not commit injustice, and who to
conform to justice need not renounce any of the goods of life. The man
who enjoys a continual prosperity never sees moral duty face to face,
because his inclinations, naturally regular and moderate, always
anticipate the mandate of reason, and because no temptation to violate
the law recalls to his mind the idea of law. Entirely guided by the
sense of the beautiful, which represents reason in the world of sense, he
will reach the tomb without having known by experience the dignity of his
destiny. On the other hand, the unfortunate man, if he be at the same
time a virtuous man, enjoys the sublime privilege of being in immediate
intercourse with the divine majesty of the moral law; and as his virtue
is not seconded by any inclination, he bears witness in this lower world,
and as a human being, of the freedom of pure spirits!




REFLECTIONS ON THE USE OF THE VULGAR AND LOW ELEMENTS IN WORKS OF ART.


I call vulgar (common) all that does not speak to the mind, of which all
the interest is addressed only to the senses. There are, no doubt, an
infinite number of things vulgar in themselves from their material and
subject. But as the vulgarity of the material can always be ennobled by
the treatment, in respect of art the only question is that relating to
the vulgarity in form. A vulgar mind will dishonor the most noble matter
by treating it in a common manner. A great and noble mind, on the
contrary, will ennoble even a common matter, and it will do so by
superadding to it something spiritual and discovering in it some aspect
in which this matter has greatness. Thus, for example, a vulgar
historian will relate to us the most insignificant actions of a hero with
a scrupulousness as great as that bestowed on his sublimest exploit, and
will dwell as lengthily on his pedigree, his costume, and his household
as on his projects and his enterprises. He will relate those of his
actions that have the most grandeur in such wise that no one will
perceive that character in them. On the contrary, a historian of genius,
himself endowed with nobleness of mind, will give even to the private
life and the least considerable actions of his hero an interest and a
value that will make them considerable. Thus, again, in the matter of
the plastic arts, the Dutch and Flemish painters have given proof of a
vulgar taste; the Italians, and still more the ancient Greeks, of a grand
and noble taste. The Greeks always went to the ideal; they rejected
every vulgar feature, and chose no common subject.

A portrait painter can represent his model in a common manner or with
grandeur; in a common manner if he reproduce the merely accidental
details with the same care as the essential features, if he neglect the
great to carry out the minutiae curiously. He does it grandly if he know
how to find out and place in relief what is most interesting, and
distinguish the accidental from the necessary; if he be satisfied with
indicating what is paltry, reserving all the finish of the execution for
what is great. And the only thing that is great is the expression of the
soul itself, manifesting itself by actions, gestures, or attitudes.

The poet treats his subject in a common manner when in the execution of
his theme he dwells on valueless facts and only skims rapidly over those
that are important. He treats his theme with grandeur when he associates
with it what is great. For example, Homer treated the shield of Achilles
grandly, though the making of a shield, looking merely at the matter, is
a very commonplace affair.

One degree below the common or the vulgar is the element of the base or
gross, which differs from the common in being not only something
negative, a simple lack of inspiration or nobleness, but something
positive, marking coarse feelings, bad morals, and contemptible manners.
Vulgarity only testifies that an advantage is wanting, whereof the
absence is a matter of regret; baseness indicates the want of a quality
which we are authorized to require in all. Thus, for example, revenge,
considered in itself, in whatever place or way it manifests itself, is
something vulgar, because it is the proof of a lack of generosity. But
there is, moreover, a base vengeance, when the man, to satisfy it,
employs means exposed to contempt. The base always implies something
gross, or reminds one of the mob, while the common can be found in a
well-born and well-bred man, who may think and act in a common manner if
he has only mediocre faculties. A man acts in a common manner when he is
only taken up with his own interest, and it is in this that he is in
opposition with the really noble man, who, when necessary, knows how to
forget himself to procure some enjoyment for others. But the same man
would act in a base manner if he consulted his interests at the cost of
his honor, and if in such a case he did not even take upon himself to
respect the laws of decency. Thus the common is only the contrary of the
noble; the base is the contrary both of the noble and the seemly. To
give yourself up, unresisting, to all your passions, to satisfy all your
impulses, without being checked even by the rules of propriety, still
less by those of morality, is to conduct yourself basely, and to betray
baseness of the soul.

The artist also may fall into a low style, not only by choosing ignoble
subjects, offensive to decency and good taste, but moreover by treating
them in a base manner. It is to treat a subject in a base manner if
those sides are made prominent which propriety directs us to conceal, or
if it is expressed in a manner that incidentally awakens low ideas. The
lives of the greater part of men can present particulars of a low kind,
but it is only a low imagination that will pick out these for
representation.

There are pictures describing sacred history in which the Apostles, the
Virgin, and even the Christ, are depicted in such wise that they might be
supposed to be taken from the dregs of the populace. This style of
execution always betrays a low taste, and might justly lead to the
inference that the artist himself thinks coarsely and like the mob.

No doubt there are cases where art itself may be allowed to produce base
images: for example, when the aim is to provoke laughter. A man of
polished manners may also sometimes, and without betraying a corrupt
taste, be amused by certain features when nature expresses herself
crudely but with truth, and he may enjoy the contrast between the manners
of polished society and those of the lower orders. A man of position
appearing intoxicated will always make a disagreeable impression on us;
but a drunken driver, sailor, or carter will only be a risible object.
Jests that would be insufferable in a man of education amuse us in the
mouth of the people. Of this kind are many of the scenes of
Aristophanes, who unhappily sometimes exceeds this limit, and becomes
absolutely condemnable. This is, moreover, the source of the pleasure we
take in parodies, when the feelings, the language, and the mode of action
of the common people are fictitiously lent to the same personages whom
the poet has treated with all possible dignity and decency. As soon as
the poet means only to jest, and seeks only to amuse, we can overlook
traits of a low kind, provided he never stirs up indignation or disgust.

He stirs up indignation when he places baseness where it is quite
unpardonable, that is in the case of men who are expected to show
fine moral sense. In attributing baseness to them he will either
outrage truth, for we prefer to think him a liar than to believe that
well-trained men can act in a base manner; or his personages will offend
our moral sense, and, what is worse, excite our imagination. I do not
mean by this to condemn farces; a farce implies between the poet and the
spectator a tacit consent that no truth is to be expected in the piece.
In a farce we exempt the poet from all faithfulness in his pictures; he
has a kind of privilege to tell us untruths. Here, in fact, all the
comic consists exactly in its contrast with the truth, and so it cannot
possibly be true.

This is not all: even in the serious and the tragic there are certain
places where the low element can be brought into play. But in this case
the affair must pass into the terrible, and the momentary violation of
our good taste must be masked by a strong impression, which brings our
passion into play. In other words, the low impression must be absorbed
by a superior tragic impression. Theft, for example, is a thing
absolutely base, and whatever arguments our heart may suggest to excuse
the thief, whatever the pressure of circumstances that led him to the
theft, it is always an indelible brand stamped upon him, and,
aesthetically speaking, he will always remain a base object. On this
point taste is even less forgiving than morality, and its tribunal is
more severe; because an aesthetical object is responsible even for the
accessory ideas that are awakened in us by such an object, while moral
judgment eliminates all that is merely accidental. According to this
view a man who robs would always be an object to be rejected by the poet
who wishes to present serious pictures. But suppose this man is at the
same time a murderer, he is even more to be condemned than before by the
moral law. But in the aesthetic judgment he is raised one degree higher
and made better adapted to figure in a work of art. Continuing to judge
him from the aesthetic point of view, it may be added that he who abases
himself by a vile action can to a certain extent be raised by a crime,
and can be thus reinstated in our aesthetic estimation. This
contradiction between the moral judgment and the aesthetical judgment is
a fact entitled to attention and consideration. It may be explained in
different ways. First, I have already said that, as the aesthetic
judgment depends on the imagination, all the accessory ideas awakened in
us by an object and naturally associated with it, must themselves
influence this judgment. Now, if these accessory ideas are base, they
infallibly stamp this character on the principal object.

In the second place, what we look for in the aesthetic judgment is
strength; whilst in a judgment pronounced in the name of the moral sense
we consider lawfulness. The lack of strength is something contemptible,
and every action from which it may be inferred that the agent lacks
strength is, by that very fact, a contemptible action. Every cowardly
and underhand action is repugnant to us, because it is a proof of
impotence; and, on the contrary, a devilish wickedness can, aesthetically
speaking, flatter our taste, as soon as it marks strength. Now, a theft
testifies to a vile and grovelling mind: a murder has at least on its
side the appearance of strength; the interest we take in it aesthetically
is in proportion to the strength that is manifested in it.

A third reason is, because in presence of a deep and horrible crime we no
longer think of the quality but the awful consequences of the action.
The stronger emotion covers and stifles the weaker one. We do not look
back into the mind of the agent; we look onward into his destiny, we
think of the effects of his action. Now, directly we begin to tremble
all the delicacies of taste are reduced to silence. The principal
impression entirely fills our mind: the accessory and accidental ideas,
in which chiefly dwell all impressions of baseness, are effaced from it.
It is for this reason that the theft committed by young Ruhberg, in the
"Crime through Ambition," [a play of Iffland] far from displeasing on the
stage, is a real tragic effect. The poet with great skill has managed
the circumstances in such wise that we are carried away; we are left
almost breathless. The frightful misery of the family, and especially
the grief of the father, are objects that attract our attention, turn it
aside, from the person of the agent, towards the consequences of his act.
We are too much moved to tarry long in representing to our minds the
stamp of infamy with which the theft is marked. In a word, the base
element disappears in the terrible. It is singular that this theft,
really accomplished by young Ruhberg, inspires us with less repugnance
than, in another piece, the mere suspicion of a theft, a suspicion which
is actually without foundation. In the latter case it is a young officer
who is accused without grounds of having abstracted a silver spoon, which
is recovered later on. Thus the base element is reduced in this case to
a purely imaginary thing, a mere suspicion, and this suffices
nevertheless to do an irreparable injury, in our aesthetical
appreciation, to the hero of the piece, in spite of his innocence. This
is because a man who is supposed capable of a base action did not
apparently enjoy a very solid reputation for morality, for the laws of
propriety require that a man should be held to be a man of honor as long
as he does not show the opposite. If therefore anything contemptible is
imputed to him, it seems that by some part of his past conduct he has
given rise to a suspicion of this kind, and this does him injury, though
all the odious and the base in an undeserved suspicion are on the side of
him who accuses. A point that does still greater injury to the hero of
the piece of which I am speaking is the fact that he is an officer, and
the lover of a lady of condition brought up in a manner suitable to her
rank. With these two titles, that of thief makes quite a revolting
contrast, and it is impossible for us, when we see him near his lady, not
to think that perhaps at that very moment he had the silver spoon in his
pocket. Lastly, the most unfortunate part of the business is, that he
has no idea of the suspicion weighing over him, for if he had a knowledge
of it, in his character of officer, he would exact a sanguinary
reparation. In this case the consequences of the suspicion would change
to the terrible, and all that is base in the situation would disappear.

We must distinguish, moreover, between the baseness of feeling and that
which is connected with the mode of treatment and circumstance. The
former in all respects is below aesthetic dignity; the second in many
cases may perfectly agree with it. Slavery, for example, is abase thing;
but a servile mind in a free man is contemptible. The labors of the
slave, on the contrary, are not so when his feelings are not servile.
Far from this, a base condition, when joined to elevated feelings, can
become a source of the sublime. The master of Epictetus, who beat him,
acted basely, and the slave beaten by him showed a sublime soul. True
greatness, when it is met in a base condition, is only the more brilliant
and splendid on that account: and the artist must not fear to show us his
heroes even under a contemptible exterior as soon as he is sure of being
able to give them, when he wishes, the expression of moral dignity.

But what can be granted to the poet is not always allowed in the artist.
The poet only addresses the imagination; the painter addresses the senses
directly. It follows not only that the impression of the picture is more
lively than that of the poem, but also that the painter, if he employ
only his natural signs, cannot make the minds of his personages as
visible as the poet can with the arbitrary signs at his command: yet it
is only the sight of the mind that can reconcile us to certain exteriors.
When Homer causes his Ulysses to appear in the rags of a beggar
["Odyssey," book xiii. v. 397], we are at liberty to represent his image
to our mind more or less fully, and to dwell on it as long as we like.
But in no case will it be sufficiently vivid to excite our repugnance or
disgust. But if a painter, or even a tragedian, try to reproduce
faithfully the Ulysses of Homer, we turn away from the picture with
repugnance. It is because in this case the greater or less vividness of
the impression no longer depends on our will: we cannot help seeing what
the painter places under our eyes; and it is not easy for us to remove
the accessory repugnant ideas which the picture recalls to our mind.




DETACHED REFLECTIONS ON DIFFERENT QUESTIONS OF AESTHETICS.


All the properties by which an object can become aesthetic, can be
referred to four classes, which, as well according to their objective
differences as according to their different relation with the subject,
produce on our passive and active faculties pleasures unequal not only in
intensity but also in worth; classes which also are of an unequal use for
the end of the fine arts: they are the agreeable, the good, the sublime,
and the beautiful.

Of these four categories, the sublime and the beautiful only belong
properly to art. The agreeable is not worthy of art, and the good is at
least not its end; for the aim of art is to please, and the good, whether
we consider it in theory or in practice, neither can nor ought to serve
as a means of satisfying the wants of sensuousness. The agreeable only
satisfies the senses, and is distinguished thereby from the good, which
only pleases the reason. The agreeable only pleases by its matter, for
it is only matter that can affect the senses, and all that is form can
only please the reason. It is true that the beautiful only pleases
through the medium of the senses, by which it is distinguished from the
good; but it pleases reason, on account of its form, by which it is
essentially distinguished from the agreeable. It might be said that the
good pleases only by its form being in harmony with reason; the beautiful
by its form having some relation of resemblance with reason, and that the
agreeable absolutely does not please by its form. The good is perceived
by thought, the beautiful by intuition, and the agreeable only by the
senses. The first pleases by the conception, the second by the idea, and
the third by material sensation.

The distance between the good and the agreeable is that which strikes the
eyes the most. The good widens our understanding, because it procures
and supposes an idea of its object; the pleasure which it makes us
perceive rests on an objective foundation, even when this pleasure itself
is but a certain state in which we are situated. The, agreeable, on the
contrary, produces no notion of its object, and, indeed, reposes on no
objective foundation. It is agreeable only inasmuch as it is felt by the
subject, and the idea of it completely vanishes the moment an obstruction
is placed on the affectibility of the senses, or only when it is
modified. For a man who feels the cold the agreeable would be a warm
air; but this same man, in the heat of summer, would seek the shade and
coolness; but we must agree that in both cases he has judged well.

On the other hand, that which is objective is altogether independent of
us, and that which to-day appears to us true, useful, reasonable, ought
yet (if this judgment of to-day be admitted as just) to seem to us the
same twenty years hence. But our judgment of the agreeable changes as
soon as our state, with regard to its object, has changed. The agreeable
is therefore not a property of the object; it springs entirely from the
relations of such an object with our senses, for the constitution of our
senses is a necessary condition thereof.

The good, on the contrary, is good in itself, before being represented to
us, and before being felt. The property by which it pleases exists fully
in itself without being in want of our subject, although the pleasure
which we take in it rests on an aptitude for feeling that which is in us.
Thus we can say that the agreeable exists only because it is experienced,
and that the good, on the contrary, is experienced because it exists.

The distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable, great as it is,
moreover, strikes the eye less. The beautiful approaches the agreeable
in this--that it must always be proposed to the senses, inasmuch as it
pleases only as a phenomenon. It comes near to it again in as far as it
neither procures nor supposes any notion of its object. But, on the
other hand, it is widely separated from the agreeable, because it pleases
by the form under which it is produced, and not by the fact of the
material sensation. No doubt it only pleases the reasonable subject in
so far as it is also a sensuous subject; but also it pleases the sensuous
subject only inasmuch as it is at the same time a reasonable subject.
The beautiful is not only pleasing to the individual but to the whole
species; and although it draws its existence but from its relation with
creatures at the same time reasonable and sensuous, it is not less
independent of all empirical limitations of sensuousness, and it remains
identical even when the particular constitution of the individual is
modified. The beautiful has exactly in common with the good that by
which it differs from the agreeable, and it differs from the good exactly
in that in which it approximates to the agreeable.

By the good we must understand that in which reason recognizes a
conformity with her theoretical and practical laws. But the same object
can be perfectly conformable to the theoretical reason, and not be the
less in contradiction in the highest degree with the practical reason.
We can disapprove of the end of an enterprise, and yet admire the skill
of the means and their relation with the end in view. We can despise the
pleasures which the voluptuous man makes the end of his life, and
nevertheless praise the skill which he exhibits in the choice of his
means, and the logical result with which he carries out his principles.
That which pleases us only by its form is good, absolutely good, and
without any conditions, when its form is at the same time its matter.
The good is also an object of sensuousness, but not of an immediate
sensuousness, as the agreeable, nor moreover of a mixed sensuousness, as
the beautiful. It does not excite desire as the first, nor inclination
as the second. The simple idea of the good inspires only esteem.

The difference separating the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful
being thus established, it is evident that the same object can be ugly,
defective, even to be morally rejected, and nevertheless be agreeable and
pleasing to the senses; that an object can revolt the senses, and yet be
good, i.e., please the reason; that an object can from its inmost nature
revolt the moral senses, and yet please the imagination which
contemplates it, and still be beautiful. It is because each one of these
ideas interests different faculties, and interests differently.

But have we exhausted the classification of the aesthetic attributes?
No, there are objects at the same time ugly, revolting, and horrifying to
the senses, which do not please the understanding, and of no account to
the moral judgment, and these objects do not fail to please; certainly to
please to such a degree, that we would willingly sacrifice the pleasure
of these senses and that of the understanding to procure for us the
enjoyment of these objects. There is nothing more attractive in nature
than a beautiful landscape, illuminated by the purple light of evening.
The rich variety of the objects, the mellow outlines, the play of lights
infinitely varying the aspect, the light vapors which envelop distant
objects,--all combine in charming the senses; and add to it, to increase
our pleasure, the soft murmur of a cascade, the song of the nightingales,
an agreeable music. We give ourselves up to a soft sensation of repose,
and whilst our senses, touched by the harmony of the colors, the forms,
and the sounds, experience the agreeable in the highest, the mind is
rejoiced by the easy and rich flow of the ideas, the heart by the
sentiments which overflow in it like a torrent. All at once a storm
springs up, darkening the sky and all the landscape, surpassing and
silencing all other noises, and suddenly taking from us all our
pleasures. Black clouds encircle the horizon; the thunder falls with a
deafening noise. Flash succeeds flash. Our sight and hearing is
affected in the most revolting manner. The lightning only appears to
render to us more visible the horrors of the night: we see the electric
fluid strike, nay, we begin to fear lest it may strike us. Well, that
does not prevent us from believing that we have gained more than lost by
the change; I except, of course, those whom fear has bereft of all
liberty of judgment. We are, on the one hand, forcibly drawn towards
this terrible spectacle, which on the other wounds and repulses our
senses, and we pause before it with a feeling which we cannot properly
call a pleasure, but one which we often like much more than pleasure.
But still, the spectacle that nature then offers to us is in itself
rather destructive than good (at all events we in no way need to think of
the utility of a storm to take pleasure in this phenomenon), is in itself
rather ugly than beautiful, for the darkness, hiding from us all the
images which light affords, cannot be in itself a pleasant thing; and
those sudden crashes with which the thunder shakes the atmosphere, those
sudden flashes when the lightning rends the cloud--all is contrary to one
of the essential conditions of the beautiful, which carries with it
nothing abrupt, nothing violent. And moreover this phenomenon, if we
consider only our senses, is rather painful than agreeable, for the
nerves of our sight and those of our hearing are each in their turn
painfully strained, then not less violently relaxed, by the alternations
of light and darkness, of the explosion of the thunder, and silence. And
in spite of all these causes of displeasure, a storm is an attractive
phenomenon for whomsoever is not afraid of it.

Another example. In the midst of a green and smiling plain there rises a
naked and barren hillock, which hides from the sight a part of the view.
Each one would wish that this hillock were removed which disfigures the
beauty of all the landscape. Well, let us imagine this hillock rising,
rising still, without indeed changing at all its shape, and preserving,
although on a greater scale, the same proportions between its width and
height. To begin with, our impression of displeasure will but increase
with the hillock itself, which will the more strike the sight, and which
will be the more repulsive. But continue; raise it up twice as high as a
tower, and insensibly the displeasure will efface itself to make way for
quite another feeling. The hill has at last become a mountain, so high a
mountain that it is quite impossible for our eyes to take it in at one
look. There is an object more precocious than all this smiling plain
which surrounds it, and the impression that it makes on us is of such a
nature that we should regret to exchange it for any other impression,
however beautiful it might be. Now, suppose this mountain to be leaning,
and of such an inclination that we could expect it every minute to crash
down, the previous impression will be complicated with another
impression: terror will be joined to it: the object itself will be but
still more attractive. But suppose it were possible to prop up this
leaning mountain with another mountain, the terror would disappear, and
with it a good part of the pleasure we experienced. Suppose that there
were beside this mountain four or five other mountains, of which each one
was a fourth or a fifth part lower than the one which came immediately
after; the first impression with which the height of one mountain
inspired us will be notably weakened. Something somewhat analogous would
take place if the mountain itself were cut into ten or twelve terraces,
uniformly diminishing; or again if it were artificially decorated with
plantations. We have at first subjected one mountain to no other
operation than that of increasing its size, leaving it otherwise just as
it was, and without altering its form; and this simple circumstance has
sufficed to make an indifferent or even disagreeable object satisfying to
the eyes. By the second operation, this enlarged object has become at
the same time an object of terror; and the pleasure which we have found
in contemplating it has but been the greater. Finally, by the last
operation which we have made, we have diminished the terror which its
sight occasioned, and the pleasure has diminished as much. We have
diminished subjectively the idea of its height, whether by dividing the
attention of the spectator between several objects, or in giving to the
eyes, by means of these smaller mountains, placed near to the large one,
a measure by which to master the height of the mountain all the more
easily. The great and the terrible can therefore be of themselves in
certain cases a source of aesthetic pleasure.

There is not in the Greek mythology a more terrible, and at the same time
more hideous, picture than the Furies, or Erinyes, quitting the infernal
regions to throw themselves in the pursuit of a criminal. Their faces
frightfully contracted and grimacing, their fleshless bodies, their heads
covered with serpents in the place of hair--revolt our senses as much as
they offend our taste. However, when these monsters are represented to
us in the pursuit of Orestes, the murderer of his mother, when they are
shown to us brandishing the torches in their hands, and chasing their
prey, without peace or truce, from country to country, until at last, the
anger of justice being appeased, they engulf themselves in the abyss of
the infernal regions; then we pause before the picture with a horror
mixed with pleasure. But not only the remorse of a criminal which is
personified by the Furies, even his unrighteous acts nay, the real
perpetration of a crime, are able to please us in a work of art. Medea,
in the Greek tragedy; Clytemnestra, who takes the life of her husband;
Orestes, who kills his mother, fill our soul with horror and with
pleasure. Even in real life, indifferent and even repulsive or frightful
objects begin to interest us the moment that they approach the monstrous
or the terrible. An altogether vulgar and insignificant man will begin
to please us the moment that a violent passion, which indeed in no way
upraises his personal value, makes him an object of fear and terror, in
the same way that a vulgar, meaningless object becomes to us the source
of aesthetic pleasure the instant we have enlarged it to the point where
it threatens to overstep our comprehension. An ugly man is made still
more ugly by passion, and nevertheless it is in bursts of this passion,
provided that it turns to the terrible and not to the ridiculous, that
this man will be to us of the most interest. This remark extends even to
animals. An ox at the plow, a horse before a carriage, a dog, are common
objects; but excite this bull to the combat, enrage this horse who is so
peaceable, or represent to yourself this dog a prey to madness; instantly
these animals are raised to the rank of aesthetic objects, and we begin
to regard them with a feeling which borders on pleasure and esteem. The
inclination to the pathetic--an inclination common to all men--the
strength of the sympathetic sentiment--this force which in mature makes
us wish to see suffering, terror, dismay, which has so many attractions
for us in art, which makes us hurry to the theatre, which makes us take
so much pleasure in the picturing of great misfortune,--all this bears
testimony to a fourth source of aesthetic pleasure, which neither the
agreeable, nor the good, nor the beautiful are in a state to produce.

All the examples that I have alleged up to the present have this in
common--that the feeling they excite in us rests on something objective.
In all these phenomena we receive the idea of something "which oversteps,
or which threatens to overstep, the power of comprehension of our senses,
or their power of resistance"; but not, however, going so far as to
paralyze these two powers, or so far as to render us incapable of
striving, either to know the object, or to resist the impression it makes
on us. There is in the phenomena a complexity which we cannot retrace to
unity without driving the intuitive faculty to its furthest limits.

We have the idea of a force in comparison with which our own vanishes,
and which we are nevertheless compelled to compare with our own. Either
it is an object which at the same time presents and hides itself from our
faculty of intuition, and which urges us to strive to represent it to
ourselves, without leaving room to hope that this aspiration will be
satisfied; or else it is an object which appears to upraise itself as an
enemy, even against our existence--which provokes us, so to say, to
combat, and makes us anxious as to the issue. In all the alleged
examples there is visible in the same way the same action on the faculty
of feeling. All throw our souls into an anxious agitation and strain its
springs. A certain gravity which can even raise itself to a solemn
rejoicing takes possession of our soul, and whilst our organs betray
evident signs of internal anxiety, our mind falls back on itself by
reflection, and appears to find a support in a higher consciousness of
its independent strength and dignity. This consciousness of ourselves
must always dominate in order that the great and the horrible may have
for us an aesthetic value. It is because the soul before such sights as
these feels itself inspired and lifted above itself that they are
designated under the name of sublime, although the things themselves are
objectively in no way sublime; and consequently it would be more just to
say that they are elevating than to call them in themselves elevated or
sublime.

For an object to be called sublime it must be in opposition with our
sensuousness. In general it is possible to conceive but two different
relations between the objects and our sensuousness, and consequently
there ought to be two kinds of resistance. They ought either to be
considered as objects from which we wish to draw a knowledge, or else
they should be regarded as a force with which we compare our own.
According to this division there are two kinds of the sublime, the
sublime of knowledge and the sublime of force. Moreover, the sensuous
faculties contribute to knowledge only in grasping a given matter, and
putting one by the other its complexity in time and in space.

As to dissecting this complex property and assorting it, it is the
business of the understanding and not of the imagination. It is for the
understanding alone that the diversity exists: for the imagination
(considered simply as a sensuous faculty) there is but an uniformity, and
consequently it is but the number of the uniform things (the quantity and
not the quality) which can give origin to any difference between the
sensuous perception of phenomena. Thus, in order that the faculty of
picturing things sensuously maybe reduced to impotence before an object,
necessarily it is imperative that this object exceeds in its quantity the
capacity of our imagination.




ON SIMPLE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRY.


There are moments in life when nature inspires us with a sort of love and
respectful emotion, not because she is pleasing to our senses, or because
she satisfies our mind or our taste (it is often the very opposite that
happens), but merely because she is nature. This feeling is often
elicited when nature is considered in her plants, in her mineral kingdom,
in rural districts; also in the case of human nature, in the case of
children, and in the manners of country people and of the primitive
races. Every man of refined feeling, provided he has a soul, experiences
this feeling when he walks out under the open sky, when he lives in the
country, or when he stops to contemplate the monuments of early ages; in
short, when escaping from factitious situations and relations, he finds
himself suddenly face to face with nature. This interest, which is often
exalted in us so as to become a want, is the explanation of many of our
fancies for flowers and for animals, our preference for gardens laid out
in the natural style, our love of walks, of the country and those who
live there, of a great number of objects proceeding from a remote
antiquity, etc. It is taken for granted that no affectation exists in
the matter, and moreover that no accidental interest comes into play.
But this sort of interest which we take in nature is only possible under
two conditions. First the object that inspires us with this feeling must
be really nature, or something we take for nature; secondly this object
must be in the full sense of the word simple, that is, presenting the
entire contrast of nature with art, all the advantage remaining on the
side of nature. Directly this second condition is united to the first,
but no sooner, nature assumes the character of simplicity.

Considered thus, nature is for us nothing but existence in all its
freedom; it is the constitution of things taken in themselves; it is
existence itself according to its proper and immutable laws.

It is strictly necessary that we should have this idea of nature to take
an interest in phenomena of this kind. If we conceive an artificial
flower so perfectly imitated that it has all the appearance of nature and
would produce the most complete illusion, or if we imagine the imitation
of simplicity carried out to the extremest degree, the instant we
discover it is only an imitation, the feeling of which I have been
speaking is completely destroyed. It is, therefore, quite evident that
this kind of satisfaction which nature causes us to feel is not a
satisfaction of the aesthetical taste, but a satisfaction of the moral
sense; for it is produced by means of a conception and not immediately by
the single fact of intuition: accordingly it is by no means determined by
the different degrees of beauty in forms. For, after all, is there
anything so specially charming in a flower of common appearance, in a
spring, a moss-covered stone, the warbling of birds, or the buzzing of
bees, etc.? What is that can give these objects a claim to our love? It
is not these objects in themselves; it is an idea represented by them
that we love in them. We love in them life and its latent action, the
effects peacefully produced by beings of themselves, existence under its
proper laws, the inmost necessity of things, the eternal unity of their
nature.

These objects which captivate us are what we were, what we must be again
some day. We were nature as they are; and culture, following the way of
reason and of liberty, must bring us back to nature. Accordingly, these
objects are an image of our infancy irrevocably past--of our infancy
which will remain eternally very dear to us, and thus they infuse a
certain melancholy into us; they are also the image of our highest
perfection in the ideal world, whence they excite a sublime emotion in
us.

But the perfection of these objects is not a merit that belongs to them,
because it is not the effect of their free choice. Accordingly they
procure quite a peculiar pleasure for us, by being our models without
having anything humiliating for us. It is like a constant manifestation
of the divinity surrounding us, which refreshes without dazzling us. The
very feature that constitutes their character is precisely what is
lacking in ours to make it complete; and what distinguishes us from them
is precisely what they lack to be divine. We are free and they are
necessary; we change and they remain identical. Now it is only when
these two conditions are united, when the will submits freely to the laws
of necessity, and when, in the midst of all the changes of which the
imagination is susceptible, reason maintains its rule--it is only then
that the divine or the ideal is manifested. Thus we perceive eternally
in them that which we have not, but which we are continually forced to
strive after; that which we can never reach, but which we can hope to
approach by continual progress. And we perceive in ourselves an
advantage which they lack, but in which some of them--the beings deprived
of reason--cannot absolutely share, and in which the others, such as
children, can only one day have a share by following our way.
Accordingly, they procure us the most delicious feeling of our human
nature, as an idea, though in relation to each determinate state of our
nature they cannot fail to humble us.

As this interest in nature is based on an idea, it can only manifest
itself in a soul capable of ideas, that is, in a moral soul. For the
immense majority it is nothing more than pure affectation; and this taste
of sentimentality so widely diffused in our day, manifesting itself,
especially since the appearance of certain books, by sentimental
excursions and journeys, by sentimental gardens, and other fancies akin
to these--this taste by no means proves that true refinement of sense has
become general. Nevertheless, it is certain that nature will always
produce something of this impression, even on the most insensible hearts,
because all that is required for this is the moral disposition or
aptitude, which is common to all men. For all men, however contrary
their acts may be to simplicity and to the truth of nature, are brought
back to it in their ideas. This sensibility in connection with nature is
specially and most strongly manifested, in the greater part of persons,
in connection with those sorts of objects which are closely related to
us, and which, causing us to look closer into ourselves, show us more
clearly what in us departs from nature; for example, in connection with
children, or with nations in a state of infancy. It is an error to
suppose that it is only the idea of their weakness that, in certain
moments, makes us dwell with our eyes on children with so much emotion.
This may be true with those who, in the presence of a feeble being, are
used to feel nothing but their own superiority. But the feeling of which
I speak is only experienced in a very peculiar moral disposition, nor
must it be confounded with the feeling awakened in us by the joyous
activity of children. The feeling of which I speak is calculated rather
to humble than to flatter our self-love; and if it gives us the idea of
some advantage, this advantage is at all events not on our side.

We are moved in the presence of childhood, but it is not because from the
height of our strength and of our perfection we drop a look of pity on
it; it is, on the contrary, because from the depths of our impotence, of
which the feeling is inseparable from that of the real and determinate
state to which we have arrived, we raise our eyes to the child's
determinableness and pure innocence. The feeling we then experience is
too evidently mingled with sadness for us to mistake its source. In the
child, all is disposition and destination; in us, all is in the state of
a completed, finished thing, and the completion always remains infinitely
below the destination. It follows that the child is to us like the
representation of the ideal; not, indeed, of the ideal as we have
realized it, but such as our destination admitted; and, consequently, it
is not at all the idea of its indigence, of its hinderances, that makes
us experience emotion in the child's presence; it is, on the contrary,
the idea of its pure and free force, of the integrity, the infinity of
its being. This is the reason why, in the sight of every moral and
sensible man, the child will always be a sacred thing; I mean an object
which, by the grandeur of an idea, reduces to nothingness all grandeur
realized by experience; an object which, in spite of all it may lose in
the judgment of the understanding, regains largely the advantage before
the judgment of reason.

Now it is precisely this contradiction between the judgment of reason and
that of the understanding which produces in us this quite special
phenomenon, this mixed feeling, called forth in us by the sight of the
simple--I mean the simple in the manner of thinking. It is at once the
idea of a childlike simplicity and of a childish simplicity. By what it
has of childish simplicity it exposes a weak side to the understanding,
and provokes in us that smile by which we testify our superiority (an
entirely speculative superiority). But directly we have reason to think
that childish simplicity is at the same time a childlike simplicity--that
it is not consequently a want of intelligence, an infirmity in a
theoretical point of view, but a superior force (practically), a
heart-full of truth and innocence, which is its source, a heart that has
despised the help of art because it was conscious of its real and
internal greatness--directly this is understood, the understanding no
longer seeks to triumph. Then raillery, which was directed against
simpleness, makes way for the admiration inspired by noble simplicity.
We feel ourselves obliged to esteem this object, which at first made us
smile, and directing our eyes to ourselves, to feel ourselves unhappy in
not resembling it. Thus is produced that very special phenomenon of a
feeling in which good-natured raillery, respect, and sadness are
confounded. It is the condition of the simple that nature should triumph
over art, either unconsciously to the individual and against his
inclination, or with his full and entire cognizance. In the former case
it is simplicity as a surprise, and the impression resulting from it is
one of gayety; in the second case, it is simplicity of feeling, and we
are moved.

With regard to simplicity as a surprise, the person must be morally
capable of denying nature. In simplicity of feeling the person may be
morally incapable of this, but we must not think him physically
incapable, in order that it may make upon us the impression of the
simple. This is the reason why the acts and words of children only
produce the impression of simplicity upon us when we forget that they are
physically incapable of artifice, and in general only when we are
exclusively impressed by the contrast between their natural character and
what is artificial in us. Simplicity is a childlike ingenuousness which
is encountered when it is not expected; and it is for this very reason
that, taking the word in its strictest sense, simplicity could not be
attributed to childhood properly speaking.

But in both cases, in simplicity as a surprise and simplicity as a
feeling, nature must always have the upper hand, and art succumb to her.

Until we have established this distinction we can only form an incomplete
idea of simplicity. The affections are also something natural, and the
rules of decency are artificial; yet the triumph of the affections over
decency is anything but simple. But when affection triumphs over
artifice, over false decency, over dissimulation, we shall have no
difficulty in applying the word simple to this. Nature must therefore
triumph over art, not by its blind and brutal force as a dynamical power,
but in virtue of its form as a moral magnitude; in a word, not as a want,
but as an internal necessity. It must not be insufficiency, but the
inopportune character of the latter that gives nature her victory; for
insufficiency is only a want and a defect, and nothing that results from
a want or defect could produce esteem. No doubt in the simplicity
resulting from surprise, it is always the predominance of affection and a
want of reflection that causes us to appear natural. But this want and
this predominance do not by any means suffice to constitute simplicity;
they merely give occasion to nature to obey without let or hinderance her
moral constitution, that is, the law of harmony.

The simplicity resulting from surprise can only be encountered in man and
that only in as far as at the moment he ceases to be a pure and innocent
nature. This sort of simplicity implies a will that is not in harmony
with that which nature does of her own accord. A person simple after
this fashion, when recalled to himself, will be the first to be alarmed
at what he is; on the other hand, a person in whom simplicity is found as
a feeling, will only wonder at one thing, that is, at the way in which
men feel astonishment. As it is not the moral subject as a person, but
only his natural character set free by affection, that confesses the
truth, it follows from this that we shall not attribute this sincerity to
man as a merit, and that we shall be entitled to laugh at it, our
raillery not being held in check by any personal esteem for his
character. Nevertheless, as it is still the sincerity of nature which,
even in the simplicity caused by surprise, pierces suddenly through the
veil of dissimulation, a satisfaction of a superior order is mixed with
the mischievous joy we feel in having caught any one in the act. This is
because nature, opposed to affectation, and truth, opposed to deception,
must in every case inspire us with esteem. Thus we experience, even in
the presence of simplicity originating in surprise, a really moral
pleasure, though it be not in connection with a moral object.

I admit that in simplicity proceeding from surprise we always experience
a feeling of esteem for nature, because we must esteem truth; whereas in
the simplicity of feeling we esteem the person himself, enjoying in this
way not only a moral satisfaction, but also a satisfaction of which the
object is moral. In both cases nature is right, since she speaks the
truth; but in the second case not only is nature right, but there is also
an act that does honor to the person. In the first case the sincerity of
nature always puts the person to the blush, because it is involuntary; in
the second it is always a merit which must be placed to the credit of the
person, even when what he confesses is of a nature to cause a blush.

We attribute simplicity of feeling to a man, when, in the judgments he
pronounces on things, he passes, without seeing them, over all the
factitious and artificial sides of an object, to keep exclusively to
simple nature. We require of him all the judgments that can be formed of
things without departing from a sound nature; and we only hold him
entirely free in what presupposes a departure from nature in his mode of
thinking or feeling.

If a father relates to his son that such and such a person is dying of
hunger, and if the child goes and carries the purse of his father to this
unfortunate being, this is a simple action. It is in fact a healthy
nature that acts in the child; and in a world where healthy nature would
be the law, he would be perfectly right to act so. He only sees the
misery of his neighbor and the speediest means of relieving him. The
extension given to the right of property, in consequence of which part of
the human race might perish, is not based on mere nature. Thus the act
of this child puts to shame real society, and this is acknowledged by our
heart in the pleasure it experiences from this action.

If a good-hearted man, inexperienced in the ways of the world, confides
his secrets to another, who deceives him, but who is skilful in
disguising his perfidy, and if by his very sincerity he furnishes him
with the means of doing him injury, we find his conduct simple. We laugh
at him, yet we cannot avoid esteeming him, precisely on account of his
simplicity. This is because his trust in others proceeds from the
rectitude of his own heart; at all events, there is simplicity here only
as far as this is the case.

Simplicity in the mode of thinking cannot then ever be the act of a
depraved man; this quality only belongs to children, and to men who are
children in heart. It often happens to these in the midst of the
artificial relations of the great world to act or to think in a simple
manner. Being themselves of a truly good and humane nature, they forget
that they have to do with a depraved world; and they act, even in the
courts of kings, with an ingenuousness and an innocence that are only
found in the world of pastoral idyls.

Nor is it always such an easy matter to distinguish exactly childish
candor from childlike candor, for there are actions that are on the
skirts of both. Is a certain act foolishly simple, and must we laugh at
it? or is it nobly simple, and must we esteem the actors the higher on
that account? It is difficult to know which side to take in some cases.
A very remarkable example of this is found in the history of the
government of Pope Adrian VI., related by Mr. Schroeckh with all the
solidity and the spirit of practical truth which distinguish him.
Adrian, a Netherlander by birth, exerted the pontifical sway at one of
the most critical moments for the hierarchy--at a time when an
exasperated party laid bare without any scruple all the weak sides of the
Roman Church, while the opposite party was interested in the highest
degree in covering them over. I do not entertain the question how a man
of a truly simple character ought to act in such a case, if such a
character were placed in the papal chair. But, we ask, how could this
simplicity of feeling be compatible with the part of a pope? This
question gave indeed very little embarrassment to the predecessors and
successors of Adrian. They followed uniformly the system adopted once
for all by the court of Rome, not to make any concessions anywhere. But
Adrian had preserved the upright character of his nation and the
innocence of his previous condition. Issuing from the humble sphere of
literary men to rise to this eminent position, he did not belie at that
elevation the primitive simplicity of his character. He was moved by the
abuses of the Roman Church, and he was much too sincere to dissimulate
publicly what he confessed privately. It was in consequence of this
manner of thinking that, in his instruction to his legate in Germany, he
allowed himself to be drawn into avowals hitherto unheard of in a
sovereign pontiff, and diametrically contrary to the principles of that
court "We know well," he said, among other things, "that for many years
many abominable things have taken place in this holy chair; it is not
therefore astonishing that the evil has been propagated from the head to
the members, from the pope to the prelates. We have all gone astray from
the good road, and for a long time there is none of us, not one, who has
done anything good." Elsewhere he orders his legate to declare in his
name "that he, Adrian, cannot be blamed for what other popes have done
before him; that he himself, when he occupied a comparatively mediocre
position, had always condemned these excesses." It may easily be
conceived how such simplicity in a pope must have been received by the
Roman clergy. The smallest crime of which he was accused was that of
betraying the church and delivering it over to heretics. Now this
proceeding, supremely imprudent in a pope, would yet deserve our esteem
and admiration if we could believe it was real simplicity; that is, that
Adrian, without fear of consequences, had made such an avowal, moved by
his natural sincerity, and that he would have persisted in acting thus,
though he had understood all the drift of his clumsiness. Unhappily we
have some reason to believe that he did not consider his conduct as
altogether impolitic, and that in his candor he went so far as to flatter
himself that he had served very usefully the interests of his church by
his indulgence to his adversaries. He did not even imagine that he ought
to act thus in his quality as an honest man; he thought also as a pope to
be able to justify himself, and forgetting that the most artificial of
structures could only be supported by continuing to deny the truth, he
committed the unpardonable fault of having recourse to means of safety,
excellent perhaps, in a natural situation, but here applied to entirely
contrary circumstances. This necessarily modifies our judgment very
much, and although we cannot refuse our esteem for the honesty of heart
in which the act originates, this esteem is greatly lessened when we
reflect that nature on this occasion was too easily mistress of art, and
that the heart too easily overruled the head.

True genius is of necessity simple, or it is not genius. Simplicity
alone gives it this character, and it cannot belie in the moral order
what it is in the intellectual and aesthetical order. It does not know
those rules, the crutches of feebleness, those pedagogues which prop up
slippery spirits; it is only guided by nature and instinct, its guardian
angel; it walks with a firm, calm step across all the snares of false
taste, snares in which the man without genius, if he have not the
prudence to avoid them the moment he detects them, remains infallibly
imbedded. It is therefore the part only of genius to issue from the
known without ceasing to be at home, or to enlarge the circle of nature
without overstepping it. It does indeed sometimes happen that a great
genius oversteps it; but only because geniuses have their moments of
frenzy, when nature, their protector, abandons them, because the force of
example impels them, or because the corrupt taste of their age leads them
astray.

The most intricate problems must be solved by genius with simplicity,
without pretension, with ease; the egg of Christopher Columbus is the
emblem of all the discoveries of genius. It only justifies its character
as genius by triumphing through simplicity over all the complications of
art. It does not proceed according to known principles, but by feelings
and inspiration; the sallies of genius are the inspirations of a God (all
that healthy nature produces is divine); its feelings are laws for all
time, for all human generations.

This childlike character imprinted by genius on its works is also shown
by it in its private life and manners. It is modest, because nature is
always so; but it is not decent, because corruption alone is decent. It
is intelligent, because nature cannot lack intelligence; but it is not
cunning, because art only can be cunning. It is faithful to its
character and inclinations, but this is not so much because it has
principles as because nature, notwithstanding all its oscillations,
always returns to its equilibrium, and brings back the same wants. It is
modest and even timid, because genius remains always a secret to itself;
but it is not anxious, because it does not know the dangers of the road
in which it walks. We know little of the private life of the greatest
geniuses; but the little that we know of it--what tradition has
preserved, for example, of Sophocles, of Archimedes, of Hippocrates, and
in modern times of Ariosto, of Dante, of Tasso, of Raphael, of Albert
Duerer, of Cervantes, of Shakespeare, of Fielding, of Sterne, etc.--
confirms this assertion.

Nay, more; though this admission seems more difficult to support, even
the greatest philosophers and great commanders, if great by their genius,
have simplicity in their character. Among the ancients I need only name
Julius Caesar and Epaminondas; among the moderns Henry IV. in France,
Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden, and the Czar Peter the Great. The Duke of
Marlborough, Turenne, and Vendome all present this character. With
regard to the other sex, nature proposes to it simplicity of character as
the supreme perfection to which it should reach. Accordingly, the love
of pleasing in women strives after nothing so much as the appearance of
simplicity; a sufficient proof, if it were the only one, that the
greatest power of the sex reposes in this quality. But, as the
principles that prevail in the education of women are perpetually
struggling with this character, it is as difficult for them in the moral
order to reconcile this magnificent gift of nature with the advantages of
a good education as it is difficult for men to preserve them unchanged in
the intellectual order: and the woman who knows how to join a knowledge
of the world to this sort of simplicity in manners is as deserving of
respect as a scholar who joins to the strictness of scholastic rules the
freedom and originality of thought.

Simplicity in our mode of thinking brings with it of necessity simplicity
in our mode of expression, simplicity in terms as well as movement; and
it is in this that grace especially consists. Genius expresses its most
sublime and its deepest thoughts with this simple grace; they are the
divine oracles that issue from the lips of a child; while the scholastic
spirit, always anxious to avoid error, tortures all its words, all its
ideas, and makes them pass through the crucible of grammar and logic,
hard and rigid, in order to keep from vagueness, and uses few words in
order not to say too much, enervates and blunts thought in order not to
wound the reader who is not on his guard--genius gives to its expression,
with a single and happy stroke of the brush, a precise, firm, and yet
perfectly free form. In the case of grammar and logic, the sign and the
thing signified are always heterogenous and strangers to each other: with
genius, on the contrary, the expression gushes forth spontaneously from
the idea, the language and the thought are one and the same; so that even
though the expression thus gives it a body the spirit appears as if
disclosed in a nude state. This fashion of expression, when the sign
disappears entirely in the thing signified, when the tongue, so to speak,
leaves the thought it translates naked, whilst the other mode of
expression cannot represent thought without veiling it at the same time:
this is what is called originality and inspiration in style.

This freedom, this natural mode by which genius expresses itself in works
of intellect, is also the expression of the innocence of heart in the
intercourse of life. Every one knows that in the world men have departed
from simplicity, from the rigorous veracity of language, in the same
proportion as they have lost the simplicity of feelings. The guilty
conscience easily wounded, the imagination easily seduced, made an
anxious decency necessary. Without telling what is false, people often
speak differently from what they think; we are obliged to make
circumlocutions to say certain things, which however, can never afflict
any but a sickly self-love, and that have no danger except for a depraved
imagination. The ignorance of these laws of propriety (conventional
laws), coupled with a natural sincerity which despises all kinds of bias
and all appearance of falsity (sincerity I mean, not coarseness, for
coarseness dispenses with forms because it is hampered), gives rise in
the intercourse of life to a simplicity of expression that consists in
naming things by their proper name without circumlocution. This is done
because we do not venture to designate them as they are, or only to do so
by artificial means. The ordinary expressions of children are of this
kind. They make us smile because they are in opposition to received
manners; but men would always agree in the bottom of their hearts that
the child is right.

It is true that simplicity of feeling cannot properly be attributed to
the child any more than to the man,--that is, to a being not absolutely
subject to nature, though there is still no simplicity, except on the
condition that it is pure nature that acts through him. But by an effort
of the imagination, which likes to poetise things, we often carry over
these attributes of a rational being to beings destitute of reason. It
is thus that, on seeing an animal, a landscape, a building, and nature in
general, from opposition to what is arbitrary and fantastic in the
conceptions of man, we often attribute to them a simple character. But
that implies always that in our thought we attribute a will to these
things that have none, and that we are struck to see it directed
rigorously according to the laws of necessity. Discontented as we are
that we have ill employed our own moral freedom, and that we no longer
find moral harmony in our conduct, we are easily led to a certain
disposition of mind, in which we willingly address ourselves to a being
destitute of reason, as if it were a person. And we readily view it as
if it had really had to struggle against the temptation of acting
otherwise, and proceed to make a merit of its eternal uniformity, and to
envy its peaceable constancy. We are quite disposed to consider in those
moments reason, this prerogative of the human race, as a pernicious gift
and as an evil; we feel so vividly all that is imperfect in our conduct
that we forget to be just to our destiny and to our aptitudes.

We see, then, in nature, destitute of reason, only a sister who, more
fortunate than ourselves, has remained under the maternal roof, while in
the intoxication of our freedom we have fled from it to throw ourselves
into a stranger world. We regret this place of safety, we earnestly long
to come back to it as soon as we have begun to feel the bitter side of
civilization, and in the totally artificial life in which we are exiled
we hear in deep emotion the voice of our mother. While we were still
only children of nature we were happy, we were perfect: we have become
free, and we have lost both advantages. Hence a twofold and very unequal
longing for nature: the longing for happiness and the longing for the
perfection that prevails there. Man, as a sensuous being, deplores
sensibly the loss of the former of these goods; it is only the moral man
who can be afflicted at the loss of the other.

Therefore, let the man with a sensible heart and a loving nature question
himself closely. Is it your indolence that longs for its repose, or your
wounded moral sense that longs for its harmony? Ask yourself well, when,
disgusted with the artifices, offended by the abuses that you discover in
social life, you feel yourself attracted towards inanimate nature, in the
midst of solitude ask yourself what impels you to fly the world. Is it
the privation from which you suffer, its loads, its troubles? or is it
the moral anarchy, the caprice, the disorder that prevail there? Your
heart ought to plunge into these troubles with joy, and to find in them
the compensation in the liberty of which they are the consequence. You
can, I admit, propose as your aim, in a distant future, the calm and the
happiness of nature; but only that sort of happiness which is the reward
of your dignity. Thus, then, let there be no more complaint about the
loads of life, the inequality of conditions, or the hampering of social
relations, or the uncertainty of possession, ingratitude, oppression, and
persecution. You must submit to all these evils of civilization with a
free resignation; it is the natural condition of good, par excellence, of
the only good, and you ought to respect it under this head. In all these
evils you ought only to deplore what is morally evil in them, and you
must do so not with cowardly tears only. Rather watch to remain pure
yourself in the midst of these impurities, free amidst this slavery,
constant with yourself in the midst of these capricious changes, a
faithful observer of the law amidst this anarchy. Be not frightened at
the disorder that is without you, but at the disorder which is within;
aspire after unity, but seek it not in uniformity; aspire after repose,
but through equilibrium, and not by suspending the action of your
faculties. This nature which you envy in the being destitute of reason
deserves no esteem: it is not worth a wish. You have passed beyond it;
it ought to remain for ever behind you. The ladder that carried you
having given way under your foot, the only thing for you to do is to
seize again on the moral law freely, with a free consciousness, a free
will, or else to roll down, hopeless of safety, into a bottomless abyss.

But when you have consoled yourself for having lost the happiness of
nature, let its perfection be a model to your heart. If you can issue
from the circle in which art keeps you enclosed and find nature again, if
it shows itself to you in its greatness and in its calm, in its simple
beauty, in its childlike innocence and simplicity, oh! then pause before
its image, cultivate this feeling lovingly. It is worthy of you, and of
what is noblest in man. Let it no more come into your mind to change
with it; rather embrace it, absorb it into your being, and try to
associate the infinite advantage it has over you with that infinite
prerogative that is peculiar to you, and let the divine issue from this
sublime union. Let nature breathe around you like a lovely idyl, where
far from artifice and its wanderings you may always find yourself again,
where you may go to draw fresh courage, a new confidence, to resume your
course, and kindle again in your heart the flame of the ideal, so readily
extinguished amidst the tempests of life.

If we think of that beautiful nature which surrounded the ancient Greeks,
if we remember how intimately that people, under its blessed sky, could
live with that free nature; how their mode of imagining, and of feeling,
and their manners, approached far nearer than ours to the simplicity of
nature, how faithfully the works of their poets express this; we must
necessarily remark, as a strange fact, that so few traces are met among
them of that sentimental interest that we moderns ever take in the scenes
of nature and in natural characters. I admit that the Greeks are
superiorly exact and faithful in their descriptions of nature. They
reproduce their details with care, but we see that they take no more
interest in them and more heart in them than in describing a vestment, a
shield, armor, a piece of furniture, or any production of the mechanical
arts. In their love for the object it seems that they make no difference
between what exists in itself and what owes its existence to art, to the
human will. It seems that nature interests their minds and their
curiosity more than moral feeling. They do not attach themselves to it
with that depth of feeling, with that gentle melancholy, that
characterize the moderns. Nay, more, by personifying nature in its
particular phenomena, by deifying it, by representing its effects as the
acts of free being, they take from it that character of calm necessity
which is precisely what makes it so attractive to us. Their impatient
imagination only traverses nature to pass beyond it to the drama of human
life. It only takes pleasure in the spectacle of what is living and
free; it requires characters, acts, the accidents of fortune and of
manners; and whilst it happens with us, at least in certain moral
dispositions, to curse our prerogative, this free will, which exposes us
to so many combats with ourselves, to so many anxieties and errors, and
to wish to exchange it for the condition of beings destitute of reason,
for that fatal existence that no longer admits of any choice, but which
is so calm in its uniformity;--while we do this, the Greeks, on the
contrary, only have their imagination occupied in retracing human nature
in the inanimate world, and in giving to the will an influence where
blind necessity rules.

Whence can arise this difference between the spirit of the ancients and
the modern spirit? How comes it that, being, for all that relates to
nature, incomparably below the ancients, we are superior to them
precisely on this point, that we render a more complete homage to nature;
that we have a closer attachment to it; and that we are capable of
embracing even the inanimate world with the most ardent sensibility. It
is because nature, in our time, is no longer in man, and that we no
longer encounter it in its primitive truth, except out of humanity, in
the inanimate world. It is not because we are more conformable to
nature--quite the contrary; it is because in our social relations, in our
mode of existence, in our manners, we are in opposition with nature.
This is what leads us, when the instinct of truth and of simplicity is
awakened--this instinct which, like the moral aptitude from which it
proceeds, lives incorruptible and indelible in every human heart--to
procure for it in the physical world the satisfaction which there is no
hope of finding in the moral order. This is the reason why the feeling
that attaches us to nature is connected so closely with that which makes
us regret our infancy, forever flown, and our primitive innocence. Our
childhood is all that remains of nature in humanity, such as civilization
has made it, of untouched, unmutilated nature. It is, therefore, not
wonderful, when we meet out of us the impress of nature, that we are
always brought back to the idea of our childhood.

It was quite different with the Greeks in antiquity. Civilization with
them did not degenerate, nor was it carried to such an excess that it was
necessary to break with nature. The entire structure of their social
life reposed on feelings, and not on a factitious conception, on a work
of art. Their very theology was the inspiration of a simple spirit, the
fruit of a joyous imagination, and not, like the ecclesiastical dogmas of
modern nations, subtle combinations of the understanding. Since,
therefore, the Greeks had not lost sight of nature in humanity, they had
no reason, when meeting it out of man, to be surprised at their
discovery, and they would not feel very imperiously the need of objects
in which nature could be retraced. In accord with themselves, happy in
feeling themselves men, they would of necessity keep to humanity as to
what was greatest to them, and they must needs try to make all the rest
approach it; while we, who are not in accord with ourselves--we who are
discontented with the experience we have made of our humanity--have no
more pressing interest than to fly out of it and to remove from our sight
a so ill-fashioned form. The feeling of which we are treating here is,
therefore, not that which was known by the ancients; it approaches far
more nearly that which we ourselves experience for the ancients. The
ancients felt naturally; we, on our part, feel what is natural. It was
certainly a very different inspiration that filled the soul of Homer,
when he depicted his divine cowherd [Dios uphorbos, "Odyssey," xiv. 413,
etc.] giving hospitality to Ulysses, from that which agitated the soul of
the young Werther at the moment when he read the "Odyssey" [Werther, May
26, June 21, August 28, May 9, etc.] on issuing from an assembly in which
he had only found tedium. The feeling we experience for nature resembles
that of a sick man for health.

As soon as nature gradually vanishes from human life--that is, in
proportion as it ceases to be experienced as a subject (active and
passive)--we see it dawn and increase in the poetical world in the guise
of an idea and as an object. The people who have carried farthest the
want of nature, and at the same time the reflections on that matter, must
needs have been the people who at the same time were most struck with
this phenomenon of the simple, and gave it a name. If I am not mistaken,
this people was the French. But the feeling of the simple, and the
interest we take in it, must naturally go much farther back, and it dates
from the time when the moral sense and the aesthetical sense began to be
corrupt. This modification in the manner of feeling is exceedingly
striking in Euripides, for example, if compared with his predecessors,
especially Aeschylus; and yet Euripides was the favorite poet of his
time. The same revolution is perceptible in the ancient historians.
Horace, the poet of a cultivated and corrupt epoch, praises, under the
shady groves of Tibur, the calm and happiness of the country, and he
might be termed the true founder of this sentimental poetry, of which he
has remained the unsurpassed model. In Propertius, Virgil, and others,
we find also traces of this mode of feeling; less of it is found in Ovid,
who would have required for that more abundance of heart, and who in his
exile at Tomes sorrowfully regrets the happiness that Horace so readily
dispensed with in his villa at Tibur.

It is in the fundamental idea of poetry that the poet is everywhere the
guardian of nature. When he can no longer entirely fill this part, and
has already in himself suffered the deleterious influence of arbitrary
and factitious forms, or has had to struggle against this influence, he
presents himself as the witness of nature and as its avenger. The poet
will, therefore, be the expression of nature itself, or his part will be
to seek it, if men have lost sight of it. Hence arise two kinds of
poetry, which embrace and exhaust the entire field of poetry. All poets
--I mean those who are really so--will belong, according to the time when
they flourish, according to the accidental circumstances that have
influenced their education generally, and the different dispositions of
mind through which they pass, will belong, I say, to the order of the
sentimental poetry or to simple poetry.

The poet of a young world, simple and inspired, as also the poet who at
an epoch of artificial civilization approaches nearest to the primitive
bards, is austere and prudish, like the virginal Diana in her forests.
Wholly unconfiding, he hides himself from the heart that seeks him, from
the desire that wishes to embrace him. It is not rare for the dry truth
with which he treats his subject to resemble insensibility. The whole
object possesses him, and to reach his heart it does not suffice, as with
metals of little value, to stir up the surface; as with pure gold, you
must go down to the lowest depths. Like the Deity behind this universe,
the simple poet hides himself behind his work; he is himself his work,
and his work is himself. A man must be no longer worthy of the work, nor
understand it, or be tired of it, to be even anxious to learn who is its
author.

Such appears to us, for instance, Homer in antiquity, and Shakespeare
among moderns: two natures infinitely different and separated in time by
an abyss, but perfectly identical as to this trait of character. When,
at a very youthful age, I became first acquainted with Shakespeare, I was
displeased with his coldness, with his insensibility, which allows him to
jest even in the most pathetic moments, to disturb the impression of the
most harrowing scenes in "Hamlet," in "King Lear," and in "Macbeth,"
etc., by mixing with them the buffooneries of a madman. I was revolted
by his insensibility, which allowed him to pause sometimes at places
where my sensibility would bid me hasten and bear me along, and which
sometimes carried him away with indifference when my heart would be so
happy to pause. Though I was accustomed, by the practice of modern
poets, to seek at once the poet in his works, to meet his heart, to
reflect with him in his theme--in a word, to see the object in the
subject--I could not bear that the poet could in Shakespeare never be
seized, that he would never give me an account of himself. For some
years Shakespeare had been the object of my study and of all my respect
before I had learned to love his personality. I was not yet able to
comprehend nature at first hand. All that my eyes could bear was its
image only, reflected by the understanding and arranged by rules: and on
this score the sentimental poetry of the French, or that of the Germans
of 1750 to 1780, was what suited me best. For the rest, I do not blush
at this childish judgment: adult critics pronounced in that day in the
same way, and carried their simplicity so far as to publish their
decisions to the world.

The same thing happened to me in the case of Homer, with whom I made
acquaintance at a later date. I remember now that remarkable passage of
the sixth book of the "Iliad," where Glaucus and Diomed meet each other
in the strife, and then, recognizing each other as host and guest,
exchange presents. With this touching picture of the piety with which
the laws of hospitality were observed even in war, may be compared a
picture of chivalrous generosity in Ariosto. The knights, rivals in
love, Ferragus and Rinaldo--the former a Saracen, the latter a Christian
--after having fought to extremity, all covered with wounds, make peace
together, and mount the same horse to go and seek the fugitive Angelica.
These two examples, however different in other respects, are very similar
with regard to the impression produced on our heart: both represent the
noble victory of moral feeling over passion, and touch us by the
simplicity of feeling displayed in them. But what a difference in the
way in which the two poets go to work to describe two such analogous
scenes! Ariosto, who belongs to an advanced epoch, to a world where
simplicity of manners no longer existed, in relating this trait, cannot
conceal the astonishment, the admiration, he feels at it. He measures
the distance from those manners to the manners of his own age, and this
feeling of astonishment is too strong for him. He abandons suddenly the
painting of the object, and comes himself on the scene in person. This
beautiful stanza is well known, and has been always specially admired at
all times:--

"Oh nobleness, oh generosity of the ancient manners of chivalry! These
were rivals, separated by their faith, suffering bitter pain throughout
their frames in consequence of a desperate combat; and, without any
suspicion, behold them riding in company along dark and winding paths.
Stimulated by four spurs, the horse hastens his pace till they arrive at
the place where the road divides." ["Orlando Furioso," canto i., stanza
32.]

Now let us turn to old Homer. Scarcely has Diomed learned by the story
of Glaucus, his adversary, that the latter has been, from the time of
their fathers, the host and friend of his family, when he drives his
lance into the ground, converses familiarly with him, and both agree
henceforth to avoid each other in the strife. But let us hear Homer
himself:--

"'Thus, then, I am for thee a faithful host in Argos, and thou to me in
Lycia, when I shall visit that country. We shall, therefore, avoid our
lances meeting in the strife. Are there not for me other Trojans or
brave allies to kill when a god shall offer them to me and my steps shall
reach them? And for thee, Glaucus, are there not enough Achaeans, that
thou mayest immolate whom thou wishest? But let us exchange our arms, in
order that others may also see that we boast of having been hosts and
guests at the time of our fathers.' Thus they spoke, and, rushing from
their chariots, they seized each other's hands, and swore friendship the
one to the other." [Pope's "Iliad," vi. 264-287.]

It would have been difficult for a modern poet (at least to one who would
be modern in the moral sense of the term) even to wait as long as this
before expressing his joy in the presence of such an action. We should
pardon this in him the more easily, because we also, in reading it, feel
that our heart makes a pause here, and readily turns aside from the
object to bring back its thoughts on itself. But there is not the least
trace of this in Homer. As if he had been relating something that is
seen everyday--nay, more, as if he had no heart beating in his breast--he
continues, with his dry truthfulness:--

"Then the son of Saturn blinded Glaucus, who, exchanging his armor with
Diomed, gave him golden arms of the value of one hecatomb, for brass arms
only worth nine beeves." ["Iliad," vi. 234-236.]

The poets of this order,--the genuinely simple poets, are scarcely any
longer in their place in this artificial age. Accordingly they are
scarcely possible in it, or at least they are only possible on the
condition of traversing their age, like scared persons, at a running
pace, and of being preserved by a happy star from the influence of their
age, which would mutilate their genius. Never, for ay and forever, will
society produce these poets; but out of society they still appear
sometimes at intervals, rather, I admit, as strangers, who excite wonder,
or as ill-trained children of nature, who give offence. These
apparitions, so very comforting for the artist who studies them, and for
the real connoisseur, who knows how to appreciate them, are, as a general
conclusion, in the age when they are begotten, to a very small degree
preposterous. The seal of empire is stamped on their brow, and we,--we
ask the Muses to cradle us, to carry us in their arms. The critics, as
regular constables of art, detest these poets as disturbers of rules or
of limits. Homer himself may have been only indebted to the testimony of
ten centuries for the reward these aristarchs are kindly willing to
concede him. Moreover, they find it a hard matter to maintain their
rules against his example, or his authority against their rules.




SENTIMENTAL POETRY.


I have previously remarked that the poet is nature, or he seeks nature.
In the former case, he is a simple poet, in the second case, a
sentimental poet.

The poetic spirit is immortal, nor can it disappear from humanity; it can
only disappear with humanity itself, or with the aptitude to be a man, a
human being. And actually, though man by the freedom of his imagination
and of his understanding departs from simplicity, from truth, from the
necessity of nature, not only a road always remains open to him to return
to it, but, moreover, a powerful and indestructible instinct, the moral
instinct, brings him incessantly back to nature; and it is precisely the
poetical faculty that is united to this instinct by the ties of the
closest relationship. Thus man does not lose the poetic faculty directly
he parts with the simplicity of nature; only this faculty acts out of him
in another direction.

Even at present nature is the only flame that kindles and warms the
poetic soul. From nature alone it obtains all its force; to nature alone
it speaks in the artificial culture-seeking man. Any other form of
displaying its activity is remote from the poetic spirit. Accordingly it
may be remarked that it is incorrect to apply the expression poetic to
any of the so-styled productions of wit, though the high credit given to
French literature has led people for a long period to class them in that
category. I repeat that at present, even in the existing phase of
culture, it is still nature that powerfully stirs up the poetic spirit,
only its present relation to nature is of a different order from
formerly.

As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not
coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity,
like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty
and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in
their respective functions: a fortiori they are not yet in contradiction
with each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of
chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of the imagination, without
any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity; his thoughts
from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has
fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and
henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as
aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former
state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists now in an ideal
state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of
thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a
fact, a reality of his life. Well, now let us take the idea of poetry,
which is nothing else than expressing humanity as completely as possible,
and let us apply this idea to these two states. We shall be brought to
infer that, on the one hand, in the state of natural simplicity, when all
the faculties of man are exerted together, his being still manifests
itself in a harmonious unity, where, consequently, the totality of his
nature expresses itself in reality itself, the part of the poet is
necessarily to imitate the real as completely as is possible. In the
state of civilization, on the contrary, when this harmonious competition
of the whole of human nature is no longer anything but an idea, the part
of the poet is necessarily to raise reality to the ideal, or, what
amounts to the same thing, to represent the ideal. And, actually, these
are the only two ways in which, in general, the poetic genius can
manifest itself. Their great difference is quite evident, but though
there be great opposition between them, a higher idea exists that
embraces both, and there is no cause to be astonished if this idea
coincides with the very idea of humanity.

This is not the place to pursue this thought any further, as it would
require a separate discussion to place it in its full light. But if we
only compare the modern and ancient poets together, not according to the
accidental forms which they may have employed, but according to their
spirit, we shall be easily convinced of the truth of this thought. The
thing that touches us in the ancient poets is nature; it is the truth of
sense, it is a present and a living reality modern poets touch us through
the medium of ideas.

The path followed by modern poets is moreover that necessarily followed
by man generally, individuals as well as the species. Nature reconciles
man with himself; art divides and disunites him; the ideal brings him
back to unity. Now, the ideal being an infinite that he never succeeds
in reaching, it follows that civilized man can never become perfect in
his kind, while the man of nature can become so in his. Accordingly in
relation to perfection one would be infinitely below the other, if we
only considered the relation in which they are both to their own kind and
to their maximum. If, on the other hand, it is the kinds that are
compared together, it is ascertained that the end to which man tends by
civilization is infinitely superior to that which he reaches through
nature. Thus one has his reward, because having for object a finite
magnitude, he completely reaches this object; the merit of the other is
to approach an object that is of infinite magnitude. Now, as there are
only degrees, and as there is only progress in the second of these
evolutions, it follows that the relative merit of the man engaged in the
ways of civilization is never determinable in general, though this man,
taking the individuals separately, is necessarily at a disadvantage,
compared with the man in whom nature acts in all its perfection. But we
know also that humanity cannot reach its final end except by progress,
and that the man of nature cannot make progress save through culture, and
consequently by passing himself through the way of civilization.
Accordingly there is no occasion to ask with which of the two the
advantage must remain, considering this last end.

All that we say here of the different forms of humanity may be applied
equally to the two orders of poets who correspond to them.

Accordingly it would have been desirable not to compare at all the
ancient and the modern poets, the simple and the sentimental poets, or
only to compare them by referring them to a higher idea (since there is
really only one) which embraces both. For, sooth to say, if we begin by
forming a specific idea of poetry, merely from the ancient poets, nothing
is easier, but also nothing is more vulgar, than to depreciate the
moderns by this comparison. If persons wish to confine the name of
poetry to that which has in all times produced the same impression in
simple nature, this places them in the necessity of contesting the title
of poet in the moderns precisely in that which constitutes their highest
beauties, their greatest originality and sublimity; for precisely in the
points where they excel the most, it is the child of civilization whom
they address, and they have nothing to say to the simple child of nature.

To the man who is not disposed beforehand to issue from reality in order
to enter the field of the ideal, the richest and most substantial poetry
is an empty appearance, and the sublimest flights of poetic inspiration
are an exaggeration. Never will a reasonable man think of placing
alongside Homer, in his grandest episodes, any of our modern poets; and
it has a discordant and ridiculous effect to hear Milton or Klopstock
honored with the name of a "new Homer." But take in modern poets what
characterizes them, what makes their special merit, and try to compare
any ancient poet with them in this point, they will not be able to
support the comparison any better, and Homer less than any other. I
should express it thus: the power of the ancients consists in compressing
objects into the finite, and the moderns excel in the art of the
infinite.

What we have said here may be extended to the fine arts in general,
except certain restrictions that are self-evident. If, then, the
strength of the artists of antiquity consists in determining and limiting
objects, we must no longer wonder that in the field of the plastic arts
the ancients remain so far superior to the moderns, nor especially that
poetry and the plastic arts with the moderns, compared respectively with
what they were among the ancients, do not offer the same relative value.
This is because an object that addresses itself to the eyes is only
perfect in proportion as the object is clearly limited in it; whilst a
work that is addressed to the imagination can also reach the perfection
which is proper to it by means of the ideal and the infinite. This is
why the superiority of the moderns in what relates to ideas is not of
great aid to them in the plastic arts, where it is necessary for them to
determine in space, with the greatest precision, the image which their
imagination has conceived, and where they must therefore measure
themselves with the ancient artist just on a point where his superiority
cannot be contested. In the matter of poetry it is another affair, and
if the advantage is still with the ancients on that ground, as respects
the simplicity of forms--all that can be represented by sensuous
features, all that is something bodily--yet, on the other hand, the
moderns have the advantage over the ancients as regards fundamental
wealth, and all that can neither be represented nor translated by
sensuous signs, in short, for all that is called mind and idea in the
works of art.

From the moment that the simple poet is content to follow simple nature
and feeling, that he is contented with the imitation of the real world,
he can only be placed, with regard to his subject, in a single relation.
And in this respect he has no choice as to the manner of treating it. If
simple poetry produces different impressions--I do not, of course, speak
of the impressions that are connected with the nature of the subject, but
only of those that are dependent on poetic execution--the whole
difference is in the degree; there is only one way of feeling, which
varies from more to less; even the diversity of external forms changes
nothing in the quality of aesthetic impressions. Whether the form be
lyric or epic, dramatic or descriptive, we can receive an impression
either stronger or weaker, but if we remove what is connected with the
nature of the subject, we shall always be affected in the same way. The
feeling we experience is absolutely identical; it proceeds entirely from
one single and the same element to such a degree that we are unable to
make any distinction. The very difference of tongues and that of times
does not here occasion any diversity, for their strict unity of origin
and of effect is precisely a characteristic of simple poetry.

It is quite different with sentimental poetry. The sentimental poet
reflects on the impression produced on him by objects; and it is only on
this reflection that his poetic force is based. It follows that the
sentimental poet is always concerned with two opposite forces, has two
modes of representing objects to himself, and of feeling them; these are,
the real or limited, and the ideal or infinite; and the mixed feeling
that he will awaken will always testify to this duality of origin.
Sentimental poetry thus admitting more than one principle, it remains to
know which of the two will be predominant in the poet, both in his
fashion of feeling and in that of representing the object; and
consequently a difference in the mode of treating it is possible. Here,
then, a new subject is presented: shall the poet attach himself to the
real or the ideal? to the real as an object of aversion and of disgust,
or to the ideal as an object of inclination? The poet will therefore be
able to treat the same subject either in its satirical aspect or in its
elegiac aspect,--taking these words in a larger sense, which will be
explained in the sequel: every sentimental poet will of necessity become
attached to one or the other of these two modes of feeling.




SATIRICAL POETRY.


The poet is a satirist when he takes as subject the distance at which
things are from nature, and the contrast between reality and the ideal:
as regards the impression received by the soul, these two subjects blend
into the same. In the execution, he may place earnestness and passion,
or jests and levity, according as he takes pleasure in the domain of the
will or in that of the understanding. In the former case it is avenging
and pathetic satire; in the second case it is sportive, humorous, and
mirthful satire.

Properly speaking, the object of poetry is not compatible either with the
tone of punishment or that of amusement. The former is too grave for
play, which should be the main feature of poetry; the latter is too
trifling for seriousness, which should form the basis of all poetic play.
Our mind is necessarily interested in moral contradictions, and these
deprive the mind of its liberty. Nevertheless, all personal interest,
and reference to a personal necessity, should be banished from poetic
feeling. But mental contradictions do not touch the heart, nevertheless
the poet deals with the highest interests of the heart--nature and the
ideal. Accordingly it is a hard matter for him not to violate the poetic
form in pathetic satire, because this form consists in the liberty of
movement; and in sportive satire he is very apt to miss the true spirit
of poetry, which ought to be the infinite. The problem can only be
solved in one way: by the pathetic satire assuming the character of the
sublime, and the playful satire acquiring poetic substance by enveloping
the theme in beauty.

In satire, the real as imperfection is opposed to the ideal, considered
as the highest reality. In other respects it is by no means essential
that the ideal should be expressly represented, provided the poet knows
how to awaken it in our souls, but he must in all cases awaken it,
otherwise he will exert absolutely no poetic action. Thus reality is
here a necessary object of aversion; but it is also necessary, for the
whole question centres here, that this aversion should come necessarily
from the ideal, which is opposed to reality. To make this clear--this
aversion might proceed from a purely sensuous source, and repose only on
a want of which the satisfaction finds obstacles in the real. How often,
in fact, we think we feel, against society a moral discontent, while we
are simply soured by the obstacles that it opposes to our inclination.
It is this entirely material interest that the vulgar satirist brings
into play; and as by this road he never fails to call forth in us
movements connected with the affections, he fancies that he holds our
heart in his hand, and thinks he has graduated in the pathetic. But all
pathos derived from this source is unworthy of poetry, which ought only
to move us through the medium of ideas, and reach our heart only by
passing through the reason. Moreover, this impure and material pathos
will never have its effect on minds, except by over-exciting the
affective faculties and by occupying our hearts with painful feelings; in
this it differs entirely from the truly poetic pathos, which raises in us
the feeling of moral independence, and which is recognized by the freedom
of our mind persisting in it even while it is in the state of affection.
And, in fact, when the emotion emanates from the ideal opposed to the
real, the sublime beauty of the ideal corrects all impression of
restraint; and the grandeur of the idea with which we are imbued raises
us above all the limits of experience. Thus in the representation of
some revolting reality, the essential thing is that the necessary be the
foundation on which the poet or the narrator places the real: that he
know how to dispose our mind for ideas. Provided the point from which we
see and judge be elevated, it matters little if the object be low and far
beneath us. When the historian Tacitus depicts the profound decadence of
the Romans of the first century, it is a great soul which from a loftier
position lets his looks drop down on a low object; and the disposition in
which he places us is truly poetic, because it is the height where he is
himself placed, and where he has succeeded in raising us, which alone
renders so perceptible the baseness of the object.

Accordingly the satire of pathos must always issue from a mind deeply
imbued with the ideal. It is nothing but an impulsion towards harmony
that can give rise to that deep feeling of moral opposition and that
ardent indignation against moral obliquity which amounted to the fulness
of enthusiasm in Juvenal, Swift, Rousseau, Haller, and others. These
same poets would have succeeded equally well in forms of poetry relating
to all that is tender and touching in feeling, and it was only the
accidents of life in their early days that diverted their minds into
other walks. Nay, some amongst them actually tried their hand
successfully in these other branches of poetry. The poets whose names
have been just mentioned lived either at a period of degeneracy, and had
scenes of painful moral obliquity presented to their view, or personal
troubles had combined to fill their souls with bitter feelings. The
strictly austere spirit in which Rousseau, Haller, and others paint
reality is a natural result, moreover, of the philosophical mind, when
with rigid adherence to laws of thought it separates the mere phenomenon
from the substance of things. Yet these outer and contingent influences,
which always put restraint on the mind, should never be allowed to do
more than decide the direction taken by enthusiasm, nor should they ever
give the material for it. The substance ought always to remain
unchanged, emancipated from all external motion or stimulus, and it ought
to issue from an ardent impulsion towards the ideal, which forms the only
true motive that can be put forth for satirical poetry, and indeed for
all sentimental poetry.

While the satire of pathos is only adapted to elevated minds, playful
satire can only be adequately represented by a heart imbued with beauty.
The former is preserved from triviality by the serious nature of the
theme; but the latter, whose proper sphere is confined to the treatment
of subjects of morally unimportant nature, would infallibly adopt the
form of frivolity, and be deprived of all poetic dignity, were it not
that the substance is ennobled by the form, and did not the personal
dignity of the poet compensate for the insignificance of the subject.
Now, it is only given to mind imbued with beauty to impress its
character, its entire image, on each of its manifestations, independently
of the object of its manifestations. A sublime soul can only make itself
known as such by single victories over the rebellion of the senses, only
in certain moments of exaltation, and by efforts of short duration. In a
mind imbued with beauty, on the contrary, the ideal acts in the same
manner as nature, and therefore continuously; accordingly it can manifest
itself in it in a state of repose. The deep sea never appears more
sublime than when it is agitated; the true beauty of a clear stream is in
its peaceful course.

The question has often been raised as to the comparative preference to be
awarded to tragedy or comedy. If the question is confined merely to
their respective themes, it is certain that tragedy has the advantage.
But if our inquiry be directed to ascertain which has the more important
personality, it is probable that a decision may be given in favor of
comedy. In tragedy the theme in itself does great things; in comedy the
object does nothing and the poet all. Now, as in the judgments of taste
no account must be kept of the matter treated of, it follows naturally
that the aesthetic value of these two kinds will be in an inverse ratio
to the proper importance of their themes.

The tragic poet is supported by the theme, while the comic poet, on the
contrary, has to keep up the aesthetic character of his theme by his own
individual influence. The former may soar, which is not a very difficult
matter, but the latter has to remain one and the same in tone; he has to
be in the elevated region of art, where he must be at home, but where the
tragic poet has to be projected and elevated by a bound. And this is
precisely what distinguishes a soul of beauty from a sublime soul. A
soul of beauty bears in itself by anticipation all great ideas; they flow
without constraint and without difficulty from its very nature--an
infinite nature, at least in potency, at whatever point of its career you
seize it. A sublime soul can rise to all kinds of greatness, but by an
effort; it can tear itself from all bondage, to all that limits and
constrains it, but only by strength of will. Consequently the sublime
soul is only free by broken efforts; the other with ease and always.

The noble task of comedy is to produce and keep up in us this freedom of
mind, just as the end of tragedy is to re-establish in us this freedom of
mind by aesthetic ways, when it has been violently suspended by passion.
Consequently it is necessary that in tragedy the poet, as if he made an
experiment, should artificially suspend our freedom of mind, since
tragedy shows its poetic virtue by re-establishing it; in comedy, on the
other hand, care must be taken that things never reach this suspension of
freedom.

It is for this reason that the tragic poet invariably treats his theme in
a practical manner, and the comic poet in a theoretic manner, even when
the former, as happened with Lessing in his "Nathan," should have the
curious fancy to select a theoretical, and the latter should have that of
choosing a practical subject. A piece is constituted a tragedy or a
comedy not by the sphere from which the theme is taken, but by the
tribunal before which it is judged. A tragic poet ought never to indulge
in tranquil reasoning, and ought always to gain the interest of the
heart; but the comic poet ought to shun the pathetic and bring into play
the understanding. The former displays his art by creating continual
excitement, the latter by perpetually subduing his passion; and it is
natural that the art in both cases should acquire magnitude and strength
in proportion as the theme of one poet is abstract and that of the other
pathetic in character. Accordingly, if tragedy sets out from a more
exalted place, it must be allowed, on the other hand, that comedy aims at
a more important end; and if this end could be actually attained it would
make all tragedy not only unnecessary, but impossible. The aim that
comedy has in view is the same as that of the highest destiny of man, and
this consists in liberating himself from the influence of violent
passions, and taking a calm and lucid survey of all that surrounds him,
and also of his own being, and of seeing everywhere occurrence rather
than fate or hazard, and ultimately rather smiling at the absurdities
than shedding tears and feeling anger at sight of the wickedness of man.

It frequently happens in human life that facility of imagination,
agreeable talents, a good-natured mirthfulness are taken for ornaments of
the mind. The same fact is discerned in the case of poetical displays.

Now, public taste scarcely if ever soars above the sphere of the
agreeable, and authors gifted with this sort of elegance of mind and
style do not find it a difficult matter to usurp a glory which is or
ought to be the reward of so much real labor. Nevertheless, an
infallible text exists to enable us to discriminate a natural facility of
manner from ideal gentleness, and qualities that consist in nothing more
than natural virtue from genuine moral worth of character. This test is
presented by trials such as those presented by difficulty and events
offering great opportunities. Placed in positions of this kind, the
genius whose essence is elegance is sure infallibly to fall into
platitudes, and that virtue which only results from natural causes drops
down to a material sphere. But a mind imbued with true and spiritual
beauty is in cases of the kind we have supposed sure to be elevated to
the highest sphere of character and of feeling. So long as Lucian merely
furnishes absurdity, as in his "Wishes," in the "Lapithae," in "Jupiter
Tragoedus," etc., he is only a humorist, and gratifies us by his sportive
humor; but he changes character in many passages in his "Nigrinus," his
"Timon," and his "Alexander," when his satire directs its shafts against
moral depravity. Thus he begins in his "Nigrinus" his picture of the
degraded corruption of Rome at that time in this way: "Wretch, why didst
thou quit Greece, the sunlight, and that free and happy life? Why didst
thou come here into this turmoil of splendid slavery, of service and
festivals, of sycophants, flatterers, poisoners, orphan-robbers, and
false friends?" It is on such occasions that the poet ought to show the
lofty earnestness of soul which has to form the basis of all plays, if a
poetical character is to be obtained by them. A serious intention may
even be detected under the malicious jests with which Lucian and
Aristophanes pursue Socrates. Their purpose is to avenge truth against
sophistry, and to do combat for an ideal which is not always prominently
put forward. There can be no doubt that Lucian has justified this
character in his Diogenes and Demonax. Again, among modern writers, how
grave and beautiful is the character depicted on all occasions by
Cervantes in his Don Quixote! How splendid must have been the ideal that
filled the mind of a poet who created a Tom Jones and a Sophonisba! How
deeply and strongly our hearts are moved by the jests of Yorick when he
pleases! I detect this seriousness also in our own Wieland: even the
wanton sportiveness of his humor is elevated and impeded by the goodness
of his heart; it has an influence even on his rhythm; nor does he ever
lack elastic power, when it is his wish, to raise us up to the most
elevated planes of beauty and of thought.

The same judgment cannot be pronounced on the satire of Voltaire. No
doubt, also, in his case, it is the truth and simplicity of nature which
here and there makes us experience poetic emotions, whether he really
encounters nature and depicts it in a simple character, as many times in
his "Ingenu;" or whether he seeks it and avenges it as in his "Candide"
and elsewhere. But when neither one nor the other takes place, he can
doubtless amuse us with his fine wit, but he assuredly never touches us
as a poet. There is always rather too little of the serious under his
raillery, and this is what makes his vocation as poet justly suspicious.
You always meet his intelligence only; never his feelings. No ideal can
be detected under this light gauze envelope; scarcely can anything
absolutely fixed be found under this perpetual movement. His prodigious
diversity of externals and forms, far from proving anything in favor of
the inner fulness of his inspiration, rather testifies to the contrary;
for he has exhausted all forms without finding a single one on which he
has succeeded in impressing his heart. We are almost driven to fear that
in the case of his rich talent the poverty of heart alone determined his
choice of satire. And how could we otherwise explain the fact that he
could pursue so long a road without ever issuing from its narrow rut?
Whatever may be the variety of matter and of external forms, we see the
inner form return everywhere with its sterile and eternal uniformity, and
in spite of his so productive career, he never accomplished in himself
the circle of humanity, that circle which we see joyfully traversed
throughout by the satirists previously named.




ELEGIAC POETRY.


When the poet opposes nature to art, and the ideal to the real, so that
nature and the ideal form the principal object of his pictures, and that
the pleasure we take in them is the dominant impression, I call him an
elegiac poet. In this kind, as well as in satire, I distinguish two
classes. Either nature and the ideal are objects of sadness, when one is
represented as lost to man and the other as unattained; or both are
objects of joy, being represented to us as reality. In the first case it
is elegy in the narrower sense of the term; in the second case it is the
idyl in its most extended acceptation.

Indignation in the pathetic and ridicule in mirthful satire are
occasioned by an enthusiasm which the ideal has excited; and thus also
sadness should issue from the same source in elegy. It is this, and this
only, that gives poetic value to elegy, and any other origin for this
description of poetical effusion is entirely beneath the dignity of
poetry. The elegiac poet seeks after nature, but he strives to find her
in her beauty, and not only in her mirth; in her agreement with
conception, and not merely in her facile disposition towards the
requirements and demands of sense. Melancholy at the privation of joys,
complaints at the disappearance of the world's golden age, or at the
vanished happiness of youth, affection, etc., can only become the proper
themes for elegiac poetry if those conditions implying peace and calm in
the sphere of the senses can moreover be portrayed as states of moral
harmony. On this account I cannot bring myself to regard as poetry the
complaints of Ovid, which he transmitted from his place of exile by the
Black Sea; nor would they appear so to me however touching and however
full of passages of the highest poetry they might be. His suffering is
too devoid of spirit, and nobleness. His lamentations display a want of
strength and enthusiasm; though they may not reflect the traces of a
vulgar soul, they display a low and sensuous condition of a noble spirit
that has been trampled into the dust by its hard destiny. If, indeed, we
call to mind that his regrets are directed to Rome, in the Augustan age,
we forgive him the pain he suffers; but even Rome in all its splendor,
except it be transfigured by the imagination, is a limited greatness, and
therefore a subject unworthy of poetry, which, raised above every trace
of the actual, ought only to mourn over what is infinite.

Thus the object of poetic complaint ought never to be an external object,
but only an internal and ideal object; even when it deplores a real loss,
it must begin by making it an ideal loss. The proper work of the poet
consists in bringing back the finite object to the proportions of the
infinite. Consequently the external matter of elegy, considered in
itself, is always indifferent, since poetry can never employ it as it
finds it, and because it is only by what it makes of it that it confers
on it a poetic dignity. The elegiac poet seeks nature, but nature as an
idea, and in a degree of perfection that it has never reached in reality,
although he weeps over this perfection as something that has existed and
is now lost. When Ossian speaks to us of the days that are no more, and
of the heroes that have disappeared, his imagination has long since
transformed these pictures represented to him by his memory into a pure
ideal, and changed these heroes into gods. The different experiences of
such or such a life in particular have become extended and confounded in
the universal idea of transitoriness, and the bard, deeply moved, pursued
by the increase of ruin everywhere present, takes his flight towards
heaven, to find there in the course of the sun an emblem of what does not
pass away.

I turn now to the elegiac poets of modern times. Rousseau, whether
considered as a poet or a philosopher, always obeys the same tendency; to
seek nature or to avenge it by art. According to the state of his heart,
whether he prefers to seek nature or to avenge it, we see him at one time
roused by elegiac feelings, at others showing the tone of the satire of
Juneval; and again, as in his Julia, delighting in the sphere of the
idyl. His compositions have undoubtedly a poetic value, since their
object is ideal; only he does not know how to treat it in a poetic
fashion. No doubt his serious character prevents him from falling into
frivolity; but this seriousness also does not allow him to rise to poetic
play. Sometimes absorbed by passion, at others by abstractions, he
seldom if ever reaches aesthetic freedom, which the poet ought to
maintain in spite of his material before his object, and in which he
ought to make the reader share. Either he is governed by his sickly
sensibility and his impressions become a torture, or the force of thought
chains down his imagination and destroys by its strictness of reasoning
all the grace of his pictures. These two faculties, whose reciprocal
influence and intimate union are what properly make the poet, are found
in this writer in an uncommon degree, and he only lacks one thing--it is
that the two qualities should manifest themselves actually united; it is
that the proper activity of thought should show itself mixed more with
feeling, and the sensuous more with thought. Accordingly, even in the
ideal which he has made of human nature, he is too much taken up with the
limits of this nature, and not enough with its capabilities; he always
betrays a want of physical repose rather than want of moral harmony. His
passionate sensuousness must be blamed when, to finish as quickly as
possible that struggle in humanity which offends him, he prefers to carry
man back to the unintelligent uniformity of his primitive condition,
rather than see that struggle carried out in the intellectual harmony of
perfect cultivation, when, rather than await the fulfilment of art he
prefers not to let it begin; in short, when he prefers to place the aim
nearer the earth, and to lower the ideal in order to reach it the sooner
and the safer.

Among the poets of Germany who belong to this class, I shall only mention
here Haller, Kleist, and Klopstock. The character of their poetry is
sentimental; it is by the ideal that they touch us, not by sensuous
reality; and that not so much because they are themselves nature, as
because they know how to fill us with enthusiasm for nature. However,
what is true in general, as well of these three poets as of every
sentimental poet, does not evidently exclude the faculty of moving us, in
particular, by beauties of the simple genus; without this they would not
be poets. I only mean that it is not their proper and dominant
characteristic to receive the impression of objects with a calm feeling,
simple, easy, and to give forth in like manner the impression received.
Involuntarily the imagination in them anticipates intuition, and
reflection is in play before the sensuous nature has done its function;
they shut their eyes and stop their ears to plunge into internal
meditations. Their souls could not be touched by any impression without
observing immediately their own movements, without placing before their
eyes and outside themselves what takes place in them. It follows from
this that we never see the object itself, but what the intelligence and
reflection of the poet have made of the object; and even if this object
be the person itself of the poet, even when he wishes to represent to us
his own feelings, we are not informed of his state immediately or at
first hand; we only see how this state is reflected in his mind and what
he has thought of it in the capacity of spectator of himself. When
Haller deplores the death of his wife--every one knows this beautiful
elegy--and begins in the following manner:--

  "If I must needs sing of thy death,
   O Marian, what a song it would be!
   When sighs strive against words,
   And idea follows fast on idea," etc.,

we feel that this description is strictly true, but we feel also that the
poet does not communicate to us, properly speaking, his feelings, but the
thoughts that they suggest to him. Accordingly, the emotion we feel on
hearing him is much less vivid! people remark that the poet's mind must
have been singularly cooled down to become thus a spectator of his own
emotion.

Haller scarcely treated any subjects but the super-sensuous, and part of
the poems of Klopstock are also of this nature: this choice itself
excludes them from the simple kind. Accordingly, in order to treat these
super-sensuous themes in a poetic fashion, as no body could be given to
them, and they could not be made the objects of sensuous intuition, it
was necessary to make them pass from the finite to the infinite, and
raise them to the state of objects of spiritual intuition. In general,
it may be said, that it is only in this sense that a didactic poetry can
be conceived without involving contradiction; for, repeating again what
has been so often said, poetry has only two fields, the world of sense
and the ideal world, since in the sphere of conceptions, in the world of
the understanding, it cannot absolutely thrive. I confess that I do not
know as yet any didactic poem, either among the ancients or among the
moderns, where the subject is completely brought down to the individual,
or purely and completely raised to the ideal. The most common case, in
the most happy essays, is where the two principles are used together; the
abstract idea predominates, and the imagination, which ought to reign
over the whole domain of poetry, has merely the permission to serve the
understanding. A didactic poem in which thought itself would be poetic,
and would remain so, is a thing which we must still wait to see.

What we say here of didactic poems in general is true in particular of
the poems of Haller. The thought itself of these poems is not poetical,
but the execution becomes so sometimes, occasionally by the use of
images, at other times by a flight towards the ideal. It is from this
last quality only that the poems of Haller belong to this class. Energy,
depth, a pathetic earnestness--these are the traits that distinguish this
poet. He has in his soul an ideal that enkindles it, and his ardent love
of truth seeks in the peaceful valleys of the Alps that innocence of the
first ages that the world no longer knows. His complaint is deeply
touching; he retraces in an energetic and almost bitter satire the
wanderings of the mind and of the heart, and he lovingly portrays the
beautiful simplicity of nature. Only, in his pictures as well as in his
soul, abstraction prevails too much, and the sensuous is overweighted by
the intellectual. He constantly teaches rather than paints; and even in
his paintings his brush is more energetic than lovable. He is great,
bold, full of fire, sublime; but he rarely and perhaps never attains to
beauty.

For the solidity and depth of ideas, Kleist is far inferior to Haller; in
point of grace, perhaps, he would have the advantage--if, as happens
occasionally, we did not impute to him as a merit, on the one side, that
which really is a want on the other. The sensuous soul of Kleist takes
especial delight at the sight of country scenes and manners; he withdraws
gladly from the vain jingle and rattle of society, and finds in the heart
of inanimate nature the harmony and peace that are not offered to him by
the moral world. How touching is his "Aspiration after Repose"! how much
truth and feeling there is in these verses!--

  "O world, thou art the tomb of true life!
   Often a generous instinct attracts me to virtue;
   My heart is sad, a torrent of tears bathes my cheeks
   But example conquers, and thou, O fire of youth!
   Soon you dry these noble tears.
   A true man must live far from men!"

But if the poetic instinct of Kleist leads him thus far away from the
narrow circle of social relations, in solitude, and among the fruitful
inspirations of nature, the image of social life and of its anguish
pursues him, and also, alas! its chains. What he flees from he carries
in himself, and what he seeks remains entirely outside him: never can he
triumph over the fatal influence of his time. In vain does he find
sufficient flame in his heart and enough energy in his imagination to
animate by painting the cold conceptions of the understanding; cold
thought each time kills the living creations of fancy, and reflection
destroys the secret work of the sensuous nature. His poetry, it must be
admitted, is of as brilliant color and as variegated as the spring he
celebrated in verse; his imagination is vivid and active; but it might be
said that it is more variable than rich, that it sports rather than
creates, that it always goes forward with a changeful gait, rather than
stops to accumulate and mould things into shape. Traits succeed each
other rapidly, with exuberance, but without concentrating to form an
individual, without completing each other to make a living whole, without
rounding to a form, a figure. Whilst he remains in purely lyrical
poetry, and pauses amidst his landscapes of country life, on the one hand
the greater freedom of the lyrical form, and on the other the more
arbitrary nature of the subject, prevent us from being struck with this
defect; in these sorts of works it is in general rather the feelings of
the poet, than the object in itself, of which we expect the portraiture.
But this defect becomes too apparent when he undertakes, as in Cisseis
and Paches, or in his Seneca, to represent men and human actions; because
here the imagination sees itself kept in within certain fixed and
necessary limits, and because here the effect can only be derived from
the object itself. Kleist becomes poor, tiresome, jejune, and
insupportably frigid; an example full of lessons for those who, without
having an inner vocation, aspire to issue from musical poetry, to rise to
the regions of plastic poetry. A spirit of this family, Thomson, has
paid the same penalty to human infirmity.

In the sentimental kind, and especially in that part of the sentimental
kind which we name elegiac, there are but few modern poets, and still
fewer ancient ones, who can be compared to our Klopstock. Musical poetry
has produced in this poet all that can be attained out of the limits of
the living form, and out of the sphere of individuality, in the region of
ideas. It would, no doubt, be doing him a great injustice to dispute
entirely in his case that individual truth and that feeling of life with
which the simple poet describes his pictures. Many of his odes, many
separate traits in his dramas, and in his "Messiah," represent the object
with a striking truth, and mark the outline admirably; especially, when
the object is his own heart, he has given evidence on many occasions of a
great natural disposition and of a charming simplicity. I mean only that
it is not in this that the proper force of Klopstock consists, and that
it would not perhaps be right to seek for this throughout his work.
Viewed as a production of musical poetry, the "Messiah" is a magnificent
work; but in the light of plastic poetry, where we look for determined
forms and forms determined for the intuition, the "Messiah" leaves much
to be desired. Perhaps in this poem the figures are sufficiently
determined, but they are not so with intuition in view. It is
abstraction alone that created them, and abstraction alone can discern
them. They are excellent types to express ideas, but they are not
individuals nor living figures. With regard to the imagination, which
the poet ought to address, and which he ought to command by putting
before it always perfectly determinate forms, it is left here much too
free to represent as it wishes these men and these angels, these
divinities and demons, this paradise and this hell. We see quite well
the vague outlines in which the understanding must be kept to conceive
these personages; but we do not find the limit clearly traced in which
the imagination must be enclosed to represent them. And what I say here
of characters must apply to all that in this poem is, or ought to be,
action and life, and not only in this epopoeia, but also in the dramatic
poetry of Klopstock. For the understanding all is perfectly determined
and bounded in them--I need only here recall his Judas, his Pilate, his
Philo, his Solomon in the tragedy that bears that name--but for the
imagination all this wants form too much, and I must readily confess I do
not find that our poet is at all in his sphere here. His sphere is
always the realm of ideas; and he knows how to raise all he touches to
the infinite. It might be said that he strips away their bodily
envelope, to spiritualize them from all the objects with which he is
occupied, in the same way that other poets clothe all that is spiritual
with a body. The pleasure occasioned by his poems must almost always be
obtained by an exercise of the faculty of reflection; the feelings he
awakens in us, and that so deeply and energetically, flow always from
super-sensuous sources. Hence the earnestness, the strength, the
elasticity, the depth, that characterize all that comes from him; but
from that also issues that perpetual tension of mind in which we are kept
when reading him. No poet--except perhaps Young, who in this respect
exacts even more than Klopstock, without giving us so much compensation
--no poet could be less adapted than Klopstock to play the part of
favorite author and guide in life, because he never does anything else
than lead us out of life, because he never calls to arms anything save
spirit, without giving recreation and refreshment to sensuous nature by
the calm presence of any object. His muse is chaste, it has nothing of
the earthly, it is immaterial and holy as his religion; and we are forced
to admit with admiration that if he wanders sometimes on these high
places, it never happened to him to fall from them. But precisely for
this reason, I confess in all ingenuousness, that I am not free from
anxiety for the common sense of those who quite seriously and
unaffectedly make Klopstock the favorite book, the book in which we find
sentiments fitting all situations, or to which we may revert at all
times: perhaps even--and I suspect it--Germany has seen enough results of
his dangerous influence. It is only in certain dispositions of the mind,
and in hours of exaltation, that recourse can be had to Klopstock, and
that he can be felt. It is for this reason that he is the idol of youth,
without, however, being by any means the happiest choice that they could
make. Youth, which always aspires to something beyond real life, which
avoids all stiffness of form, and finds all limits too narrow, lets
itself be carried away with love, with delight, into the infinite spaces
opened up to them by this poet. But wait till the youth has become a
man, and till, from the domain of ideas, he comes back to the world of
experience, then you will see this enthusiastic love of Klopstock
decrease greatly, without, however, a riper age changing at all the
esteem due to this unique phenomenon, to this so extraordinary genius, to
these noble sentiments--the esteem that Germany in particular owes to his
high merit.

I have said that this poet was great specially in the elegiac style, and
it is scarcely necessary to confirm this judgment by entering into
particulars. Capable of exercising all kinds of action on the heart, and
having graduated as master in all that relates to sentimental poetry, he
can sometimes shake the soul by the most sublime pathos, at others cradle
it with sweet and heavenly sensations. Yet his heart prefers to follow
the direction of a lofty spiritual melancholy; and, however sublime be
the tones of his harp and of his lyre, they are always the tender notes
of his lute that resound with most truth and the deepest emotion. I take
as witnesses all those whose nature is pure and sensuous: would they not
be ready to give all the passages where Klopstock is strong, and bold;
all those fictions, all the magnificent descriptions, all the models of
eloquence which abound in the "Messiah," all those dazzling comparisons
in which our poet excels,--would they not exchange them for the pages
breathing tenderness, the "Elegy to Ebert" for example, or that admirable
poem entitled "Bardalus," or again, the "Tombs Opened before the Hour,"
the "Summer's Night," the "Lake of Zurich," and many other pieces of this
kind? In the same way the "Messiah" is dear to me as a treasure of
elegiac feelings and of ideal paintings, though I am not much satisfied
with it as the recital of an action and as an epic.

I ought, perhaps, before quitting this department, to recall the merits
in this style of Uz, Denis, Gessner in the "Death of Abel"--Jacobi,
Gerstenberg, Hoelty, De Goeckingk, and several others, who all knew how
to touch by ideas, and whose poems belong to the sentimental kind in the
sense in which we have agreed to understand the word. But my object is
not here to write a history of German poetry; I only wished to clear up
what I said further back by some examples from our literature. I wished
to show that the ancient and the modern poets, the authors of simple
poetry and of sentimental poetry, follow essentially different paths to
arrive at the same end: that the former move by nature, individuality, a
very vivid sensuous element; while the latter do it by means of ideas and
a high spirituality, exercising over our minds an equally powerful though
less extensive influence.

It has been seen, by the examples which precede, how sentimental poetry
conceives and treats subjects taken from nature; perhaps the reader may
be curious to know how also simple poetry treats a subject of the
sentimental order. This is, as it seems, an entirely new question, and
one of special difficulty; for, in the first place, has a subject of the
sentimental order ever been presented in primitive and simple periods?
And in modern times, where is the simple poet with whom we could make
this experiment? This has not, however, prevented genius from setting
this problem, and solving it in a wonderfully happy way. A poet in whose
mind nature works with a purer and more faithful activity than in any
other, and who is perhaps of all modern poets the one who departs the
least from the sensuous truth of things, has proposed this problem to
himself in his conception of a mind, and of the dangerous extreme of the
sentimental character. This mind and this character have been portrayed
by the modern poet we speak of, a character which with a burning
sensuousness embraces the ideal and flies the real, to soar up to an
infinite devoid of being, always occupied in seeking out of himself what
he incessantly destroys in himself; a mind that only finds reality in his
dreams, and to whom the realities of life are only limits and obstacles;
in short, a mind that sees only in its own existence a barrier, and goes
on, as it were, logically to break down this barrier in order to
penetrate to true reality.

It is interesting to see with what a happy instinct all that is of a
nature to feed the sentimental mind is gathered together in Werther: a
dreamy and unhappy love, a very vivid feeling for nature, the religious
sense coupled with the spirit of philosophic contemplation, and lastly,
to omit nothing, the world of Ossian, dark, formless, melancholy. Add to
this the aspect under which reality is presented, all is depicted which
is least adapted to make it lovable, or rather all that is most fit to
make it hated; see how all external circumstances unite to drive back the
unhappy man into his ideal world; and now we understand that it was quite
impossible for a character thus constituted to save itself, and issue
from the circle in which it was enclosed. The same contrast reappears in
the "Torquato Tasso" of the same poet, though the characters are very
different. Even his last romance presents, like his first, this
opposition between the poetic mind and the common sense of practical men,
between the ideal and the real, between the subjective mode and the
objective mode of seeing and representing things; it is the same
opposition, I say, but with what a diversity! Even in "Faust" we still
find this contrast, rendered, I admit--as the subject required--much more
coarsely on both hands, and materialized. It would be quite worth while
if a psychological explanation were attempted of this character,
personified and specified in four such different ways.

It has been observed further back that a mere disposition to frivolity of
mind, to a merry humor, if a certain fund of the ideal is not joined to
it, does not suffice to constitute the vocation of a satirical poet,
though this mistake is frequently made. In the same way a mere
disposition for tender sentiments, softness of heart, and melancholy do
not suffice to constitute a vocation for elegy. I cannot detect the true
poetical talent, either on one side or the other; it wants the essential,
I mean the energetic and fruitful principle that ought to enliven the
subject, and produce true beauty. Accordingly the productions of this
latter nature, of the tender nature, do nothing but enervate us; and
without refreshing the heart, without occupying the mind, they are only
able to flatter in us the sensuous nature. A constant disposition to
this mode of feeling ends necessarily, in the long run, by weakening the
character, and makes it fall into a state of passivity from which nothing
real can issue, either for external or for internal life. People have,
therefore, been quite right to persecute by pitiless raillery this fatal
mania of sentimentality and of tearful melancholy which possessed Germany
eighteen years since, in consequence of certain excellent works that were
ill understood and indiscreetly imitated. People have been right, I say,
to combat this perversity, though the indulgence with which men are
disposed to receive the parodies of these elegiac caricatures--that are
very little better themselves--the complaisance shown to bad wit, to
heartless satire and spiritless mirth, show clearly enough that this zeal
against false sentimentalism does not issue from quite a pure source. In
the balance of true taste one cannot weigh more than the other,
considering that both here and there is wanting that which forms the
aesthetic value of a work of art, the intimate union of spirit with
matter, and the twofold relation of the work with the faculty of
perception as well as with the faculty of the ideal.

People have turned Siegwart ["Siegwart," a novel by J. Mailer, published
at Ulm, 1776] and his convent story into ridicule, and yet the "Travels
into the South of France" are admired; yet both works have an equal claim
to be esteemed in certain respects, and as little to be unreservedly
praised in others. A true, though excessive, sensuousness gives value to
the former of these two romances; a lively and sportive humor, a fine
wit, recommends the other: but one totally lacks all sobriety of mind
that would befit it, the other lacks all aesthetic dignity. If you
consult experience, one is rather ridiculous; if you think of the ideal,
the other is almost contemptible. Now, as true beauty must of necessity
accord both with nature and with the ideal, it is clear that neither the
one nor the other of these two romances could pretend to pass for a fine
work. And notwithstanding all this, it is natural, as I know it by my
own experience, that the romance of Thummel should be read with much
pleasure. As a fact it only wounds those requirements which have their
principle in the ideal, and which consequently do not exist for the
greater part of readers; requirements that, even in persons of most
delicate feeling, do not make themselves felt at the moments when we read
romances. With regard to the other needs of the mind, and especially to
those of the senses, this book, on the other hand, affords unusual
satisfaction. Accordingly, it must be, and will be so, that this book
will remain justly one of the favorite works of our age, and of all
epochs when men only write aesthetic works to please, and people only
read to get pleasure.

But does not poetical literature also offer, even in its classical
monuments, some analogous examples of injuries inflicted or attempted
against the ideal and its superior purity? Are there not some who, by
the gross, sensuous nature of their subject, seem to depart strangely
from the spiritualism I here demand of all works of art? If this is
permitted to the poet, the chaste nurseling of the muses, ought it not to
be conceded to the novelist, who is only the half-brother of the poet,
and who still touches by so many points? I can the less avoid this
question because there are masterpieces, both in the elegiac and in the
satirical kind, where the authors seek and preach up a nature quite
different from that I am discussing in this essay, and where they seem to
defend it, not so much against bad as against good morals. The natural
conclusion would be either that this sort of poem ought to be rejected,
or that, in tracing here the idea of elegiac poetry, we have granted far
too much to what is arbitrary.

The question I asked was, whether what was permitted by the poet might
not be tolerated in a prose narrator too? The answer is contained in the
question. What is allowed in the poet proves nothing about what must be
allowed in one who is not a poet. This tolerancy in fact reposes on the
very idea which we ought to make to ourselves of the poet, and only on
this idea; what in his case is legitimate freedom, is only a license
worthy of contempt as soon as it no longer takes its source in the ideal,
in those high and noble inspirations which make the poet.

The laws of decency are strangers to innocent nature; the experience of
corruption alone has given birth to them. But when once this experience
has been made, and natural innocence has disappeared from manners, these
laws are henceforth sacred laws that man, who has a moral sense, ought
not to infringe upon. They reign in an artificial world with the same
right that the laws of nature reign in the innocence of primitive ages.
But by what characteristic is the poet recognized? Precisely by his
silencing in his soul all that recalls an artificial world, and by
causing nature herself to revive in him with her primitive simplicity.
The moment he has done this he is emancipated by this alone from all the
laws by which a depraved heart secures itself against itself. He is
pure, he is innocent, and all that is permitted to innocent nature is
equally permitted to him. But you who read him or listen to him, if you
have lost your innocence, and if you are incapable of finding it again,
even for a moment, in a purifying contact with the poet, it is your own
fault, and not his: why do not you leave him alone? it is not for you
that he has sung!

Here follows, therefore, in what relates to these kinds of freedoms, the
rules that we can lay down.

Let us remark in the first place that nature only can justify these
licenses; whence it follows that you could not legitimately take them up
of your own choice, nor with a determination of imitating them; the will,
in fact, ought always to be directed according to the laws of morality,
and on its part all condescending to the sensuous is absolutely
unpardonable. These licenses must, therefore, above all, be simplicity.
But how can we be convinced that they are actually simple? We shall hold
them to be so if we see them accompanied and supported by all the other
circumstances which also have their spring of action in nature; for
nature can only be recognized by the close and strict consistency, by the
unity and uniformity of its effects. It is only a soul that has on all
occasions a horror of all kinds of artifice, and which consequently
rejects them even where they would be useful--it is only that soul which
we permit to be emancipated from them when the artificial
conventionalities hamper and hinder it. A heart that submits to all the
obligations of nature has alone the right to profit also by the liberties
which it authorizes. All the other feelings of that heart ought
consequently to bear the stamp of nature: it will be true, simple, free,
frank, sensible, and straightforward; all disguise, all cunning, all
arbitrary fancy, all egotistical pettiness, will be banished from his
character, and you will see no trace of them in his writings.

Second rule: beautiful nature alone can justify freedoms of this kind;
whence it follows that they ought not to be a mere outbreak of the
appetites; for all that proceeds exclusively from the wants of sensuous
nature is contemptible. It is, therefore, from the totality and the
fulness of human nature that these vivid manifestations must also issue.
We must find humanity in them. But how can we judge that they proceed in
fact from our whole nature, and not only from an exclusive and vulgar
want of the sensuous nature? For this purpose it is necessary that we
should see--that they should represent to us--this whole of which they
form a particular feature. This disposition of the mind to experience
the impressions of the sensuous is in itself an innocent and an
indifferent thing. It does not sit well on a man only because of its
being common to animals with him; it augurs in him the lack of true and
perfect humanity. It only shocks us in the poem because such a work
having the pretension to please us, the author consequently seems to
think us capable, us also, of this moral infirmity. But when we see in
the man who has let himself be drawn into it by surprise all the other
characteristics that human nature in general embraces; when we find in
the work where these liberties have been taken the expression of all the
realities of human nature, this motive of discontent disappears, and we
can enjoy, without anything changing our joy, this simple expression of a
true and beautiful nature. Consequently this same poet who ventures to
allow himself to associate us with feelings so basely human, ought to
know, on the other hand, how to raise us to all that is grand, beautiful,
and sublime in our nature.

We should, therefore, have found there a measure to which we could
subject the poet with confidence, when he trespasses on the ground of
decency, and when he does not fear to penetrate as far as that in order
freely to paint nature. His work is common, base, absolutely
inexcusable, from the moment it is frigid, and from the moment it is
empty, because that shows a prejudice, a vulgar necessity, an unhealthy
appeal to our appetites. His work, on the other hand, is beautiful and
noble, and we ought to applaud it without any consideration for all the
objections of frigid decency, as soon as we recognize in it simplicity,
the alliance of spiritual nature and of the heart.

Perhaps I shall be told that if we adopt this criterion, most of the
recitals of this kind composed by the French, and the best imitations
made of them in Germany, would not perhaps find their interest in it; and
that it might be the same, at least in part, with many of the productions
of our most intellectual and amiable poets, without even excepting his
masterpieces. I should have nothing to reply to this. The sentence
after all is anything but new, and I am only justifying the judgment
pronounced long since on this matter by all men of delicate perceptions.
But these same principles which, applied to the works of which I have
just spoken, seem perhaps in too strict a spirit, might also be found too
indulgent when applied to some other works. I do not deny, in fact, that
the same reasons which make me hold to be quite inexcusable the dangerous
pictures drawn by the Roman Ovid and the German Ovid, those of Crebillon,
of Voltaire, of Marmontel, who pretends to write moral tales!--of
Lacroix, and of many others--that these same reasons, I say, reconcile me
with the elegies of the Roman Propertius and of the German Propertius,
and even with some of the decried productions of Diderot. This is
because the former of those works are only witty, prosaic, and
voluptuous, while the others are poetic, human, and simple.




IDYL.


It remains for me to say a few words about this third kind of sentimental
poetry--some few words and no more, for I propose to speak of it at
another time with the developments particularly demanded by the theme.

This kind of poetry generally presents the idea and description of an
innocent and happy humanity. This innocence and bliss seeming remote
from the artificial refinements of fashionable society, poets have
removed the scene of the idyl from crowds of worldly life to the simple
shepherd's cot, and have given it a place in the infancy of humanity
before the beginning of culture. These limitations are evidently
accidental; they do not form the object of the idyl, but are only to be
regarded as the most natural means to attain this end. The end is
everywhere to portray man in a state of innocence: which means a state of
harmony and peace with himself and the external world.