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.